I have given in early numbers of this series a full account of the fight we had in defence of the Canterbury School in Connecticut. More than a year before that, a number of well-qualified young men having been refused admission into Yale College and the Wesleyan Seminary at Middletown, _because of their complexion_, the Rev. Simeon S. Jocelyn, one of the best of men, generously assisted by Arthur Tappan and his brother Lewis Tappan, and others, endeavored to establish in New Haven an institution for the collegiate education of colored young men. The benevolent project was so violently opposed by “the most respectable citizens” of the place, Hon. Judge Daggett among them, that it was abandoned. A year or two afterwards the trustees of “Noyes Academy,” in Plymouth, New Hampshire, after due consideration, consented to allow colored pupils to be admitted into the academy. The respectable people of the town were so incensed, enraged by this encroachment upon the prerogative of white children, that, readily helped by the rougher but not baser sort of folks, they razed the building in which the school was kept from its foundation and carted it off into a meadow or swamp. In none of our cities, that I was acquainted with before the antislavery reform commenced, were colored children admitted into the “common schools” with white children. Hon. Horace Mann and his fellow-laborers in the cause of humanity, as well as education, put this injustice to shame in Massachusetts, if not elsewhere, and the doors of all public schools were opened to the young, without regard to complexion. But this was not the utmost of the contempt with which colored people were treated. They were not permitted to ride in any public conveyances, stage-coaches, omnibuses, or railroad-cars, nor to take passage on any steamboats or sail-packets, excepting in the steerage or on deck. Many instances of extreme suffering, as well as great inconvenience and expense, to which worthy, excellent colored persons were subjected came to the knowledge of Abolitionists, and were pressed upon the public consideration, until the crying iniquity was abated. And still there was a deeper depth to the wrong we did to these innocent victims of prejudice. In all our churches they were set apart from the white brethren, often in pews or pens, built high up against the ceiling in the corners back of the congregation, so that the favored ones who came to worship the “_impartial_ Father” of all men might not be offended at the sight of those to whom in his _inscrutable_ wisdom he had given a dark complexion. There was quite an excitement caused in the Federal Street Church in 1822 or 1823, because one of the very wealthy merchants of Boston introduced into his pew in the broad aisle, one Sunday, a black gentleman. To be sure he was richly dressed, and had a handsome person, but he was black,--very black. “That Sunday’s sermon all was lost, The very text forgot by most.”