Charitable and Christian people were moved to do what lay in their power not only to relieve present sufferings, but to enable the coloured folk to make a new start in the world. Associations were formed, money was collected, even the Government took care that rations should be distributed. The result was that the outlook soon showed signs of improvement. At one time Levi Coffin of Cincinnati reported that there were thirty-five camps in the Mississippi Valley which contained about 650,000 coloured fugitives, but these camps soon became self-supporting. The more acute want and suffering were soon relieved, but it soon became more and more apparent that service of a more permanent kind would have to be undertaken if the coloured people were to be raised from the low condition into which slavery had reduced them. People of the shrewder sort clearly saw that great results might be expected from education and industrial training. Although the prevailing ignorance was of the densest kind, all were most anxious to learn. Wherever a camp appeared it was certain that schools would speedily follow; and in what must have appeared an incredibly short space of time no less than 250 schools were established in that Mississippi Valley alone. The contemporary anonymous writer in the _Leisure Hour_ who has already been quoted, and who appears to have been thoroughly well acquainted with the negroes' characteristics and condition in their transition state, adds this word-picture of the general outlook at the time to which reference is being made:-- "They are most anxious to be taught, and most docile under direction. Their ignorance previously was universal and extreme. It is no wonder that their religious camp-meetings had become associated with the most grotesque ideas and narrations. It is no wonder that their phraseology was a caricature of civilised language. For how could they be expected to manifest intelligence without any education? So deplorably destitute of instruction were they that very few even of their preachers could read the simplest words. Old men amongst them who had preached the Gospel to their black congregations for upwards of forty years, were found totally ignorant of the alphabet, and, of course, had never read a verse of Scripture. How could the Sermons, the prayers and the religious ideas of such 'pastors' be other than grievously deficient?"