This work of the Congregationalists is entitled to mention, not as exceptional, but only as eminent among like enterprises, in which few of the leading sects have failed to be represented. Extravagant expectations were at first entertained of immediate results in bringing the long-depressed race up to the common plane of civilization. But it cannot be said that reasonable and intelligent expectations have been disappointed. Experience has taught much as to the best conduct of such missions. The gift of a fund of a million dollars by the late John F. Slater, of Norwich, has through wise management conduced to this end. It has encouraged in the foremost institutions the combination of training to skilled productive labor with education in literature and science. The inauguration of these systems of religious education at the South was the most conspicuously important of the immediate sequels of the Civil War. But this time was a time of great expansion of the activities of the church in all directions. The influx of immigration, temporarily checked by the hard times of 1857 and by the five years of war, came in again in such floods as never before.[357:1] The foreign immigration is always attended by a westward movement of the already settled population. The field of home missions became greater and more exacting than ever. The zeal of the church, educated during the war to higher ideas of self-sacrifice, rose to the occasion. The average yearly receipts of the various Protestant home missionary societies, which in the decade 1850-59 had been $808,000, rose in the next decade to more than $2,000,000, in the next to nearly $3,000,000, and for the seven years 1881-87 to $4,000,000.[358:1]