As time went on even the indolent or refractory white boy to some extent improved, and seemed conditionally sure of further improvement; but the negro, having arrived at a certain point--and that usually no high one--seemed incapable of further progress, as a man, though not afflicted with dimness of vision, is prevented by natural causes from seeing beyond the horizon. Doubtless the spirit of rivalry already mentioned, born of defiance and resentment in a mild form, was to some extent the incentive to application, and its brief duration serves to illustrate the instability of which we speak. Doubtless, also, many others, by reason of poverty, which necessitated manual labor, were unable to continue the pursuit of an education to any great advantage; but what numbers of white children, by the losses of war placed on the same footing--placed identically on the same footing, because they also and their parents were compelled to earn by labor their daily bread--have yet continued to improve! The negro had the same privilege of night study and (immediately after the war) as many teachers at his service as any white child. He had also one advantage over the white: he had never learned the difference between _meum_ and _tuum_, and the silver lining to this cloud of ignorance lay in the fact that he was thereby enabled more speedily to increase his store of worldly goods, thus leaving time for greater devotion to the particular of mental development. But take the minority of instances, where every advantage has been given him; where, freed from the relations of master and slave, he has been thrown with whites and the spirit of emulation naturally excited; where his parents have made every sacrifice necessary to procure him tutors (numbers of them had private teachers, and very competent ones too, just after the war) and books and all the paraphernalia of learning, and even the best social position possible to him in the section where he happened to be, themselves retreating into the background with the pathetic humility and self-abnegation of parents who believe and desire their offspring to be of a higher order than themselves,--does the highest culture of which he seems capable make him more than the peer of the mediocre white? I and hundreds of others have read with pleasure the speech of Rev. William D. Johnson, A.M., colored delegate to the Methodist Episcopal Conference which some months ago met in Georgia. It was a good speech for a colored man--a capitally, wonderfully good speech--and I applaud it with cordial pleasure and reciprocation of the good feeling which pervades it; but is it more than the address of the average white? As the address of any one of the white members would it have been reported, or have attracted attention, save for its animus?