Now, as the policy of the party unfriendly in a greater or less degree to the freedman, is based on the assumption of his inferiority, so the policy of his friends and benefactors—and he has friends at the South as well as at the North—must be based on the counter assertion of his manhood. It is not necessary—it is somewhat dogmatic, it is at least premature—to assert his equality in all respects with the white man. That is an ethnological question which it may take ages to settle, and when settled it will be mainly a matter of scientific interest. But that the negro is a man; that everything distinctively human belongs to him; that he is capable of improvement; that his intellectual faculties are expanded, and his moral nature is elevated by means of the same truths and the same influences which invigorate and enlarge and fructify the souls of other men, and that he is entitled to his full share, without stint or reserve, of all the knowledge and all the human agencies and the divine influences by which it is ordained that our common humanity shall reach its highest attainable perfection—this is the broad basis of principle on which the American Missionary Association, and all true missionary associations, found their policy in dealing with negroes, as with all other races of men whom God has made of one blood on all the face of the earth, and for whose common redemption and perfection Christ died, who is the Saviour of all men. But in one sense the freedman is something more than a man; he is an American citizen; and he is more than an ordinary citizen; he is a voter. He has been entrusted by the nation with the highly important duty of giving expression to the municipal, the State, and the national will in legislative, judicial and executive acts. He is an integral part of the sovereignty of this nation. We may or may not think it a national mistake to have made him so important a functionary. But the negro is here. He is here either to corrupt our politics, to degrade our social life, to debase our religion, possibly to drag us into another civil war, if we continue or repeat in some other form our injustice and tyranny to him; or, he is here to perform some useful, perhaps some noble, part in the work of developing a Christian civilization at home and extending it abroad through the earth, if we are faithful to the trust committed to us by Providence in him. The Negro Intellectually. The question of the negro’s intellectual capacity has almost become obsolete as a debatable question. Strange that it should ever have been seriously maintained, that a race which has produced its full share of the world’s great men all along through history, a race which has given to the world a Hannibal, an Augustine, a Toussaint, is a race lacking intellectual capacity. Strange it is, on the other hand, that a race, however gifted, should, though oppressed and stupefied by ages of bondage, so frequently throw off minds of a high order.