I desire to call the reader's attention to the fact that all of the A. M. E. Schools are supported entirely by the colored people. In this regard they are unlike other denominational institutions. WILBERFORCE UNIVERSITY. It is a beautiful coincidence, full of historic value, that appears in the planting of two institutions in Greene county, Ohio, some four miles apart. Between them runs a highway over which passed, some thirty-five years ago, that mysterious line known in history as the Underground Railroad. It was while the slave was yet hastening his flight from the tobacco patches, the cotton fields, the sugar plantations of the Central South to the sterner clime of England's Colony, cold yet free, that Wilberforce University rose, right beside his perilous path, to offer freedom of mind and heart to him who dared remain. The war came with its carnage and death. Twenty years later Ohio built a home where the orphan of the soldier who died to free the slave might be succored in the years of its helplessness. In sight of each other and on opposite sides of the fugitive's path to liberty, stand these historic monuments, the results of a civilization that is the glory of the century. [Illustration: WILBERFORCE UNIVERSITY.] Wilberforce University was organized in 1856 by the M. E. Church. Its object was higher educational facilities for colored youth. In its first Board of twenty-four Trustees was Hon. Salmon P. Chase, then governor of Ohio, and the fugitive slave's powerful advocate; also Rev. Richard S. Rust and Bishop Daniel A. Payne. Its first active president was Dr. R. S. Rust, and its students were largely "the natural children of Southern and Southwestern planters." On the beautiful premises, for which Nature has done so much, with its sparkling mineral springs, its varying landscape, its superb repose, the young institution grew and flourished. But the dark days of civil strife closed in upon it and its patronage from the South ceased, its operations were suspended. [Illustration: BISHOP D. A. PAYNE, D. D., LL. D., _First President of Wilberforce_.] While the war was still in progress, the future, full of misgivings, without a dollar and alone, on the night of the 10th of March, 1863, Bishop Payne purchased the college property for $10,000. He at once associated with himself Rev. James A. Shorter, afterward Bishop, and Prof. J. G. Mitchell, now Dean of Payne Theological Seminary. An act of incorporation was duly taken out, with the broad principle embodied in it that "there shall never be any distinction among the trustees, faculty or students on account of race, color or creed."