If it should be said that these are a few picked men, whose cases do not indicate the intellectual capacity of the race, I reply it is only a few picked men of any race who are capable of high intellectual attainments, and that, because the rarest of talents is that ambition for high attainments which will carry one through toils and sacrifices to the far-away prize. I know no better test of intellectual capacity than the ardent desire for knowledge, and that desire the freedmen have in a remarkable degree. When the freedman spelt out, by the light of his pine-torch, the words: “Thou God seest me,” and then jumped to his feet and exclaimed: “John Martin, you can read! John Martin, you are a man!” he uttered a truth which too few of the boasted superior race so well appreciate—that manhood comes from power to appropriate great ideas. There is no doubt that the returns for money invested in freedmen’s schools are large. No one can read the accounts sent to us by teachers in these schools, and doubt that. The soil is a virgin one, and yields great crops for a small outlay. Think what the Peabody Fund is doing for the whole South! Think how wide-reaching would be the effects of a few thousand dollars put into the colleges at Atlanta, Berea and Nashville, where it might be hoped that almost every single dollar would quicken some mind which else were benighted, but which, if enlightened, might carry light to hundreds of benighted minds. The Negro’s Moral Capacity. If the negro had come out of this long, cruel bondage without being terribly degraded morally; if, as some pretend, his moral nature had been under an elevating discipline, then had slavery not been “the sum of all villainies.” But there is no denying that the American negro bears the marks of his bondage, in his indolence, his untruthfulness, his dishonesty, his animalism. But these are all vices of the slaves, not of the men; of the condition, not of the race. The possibilities of the negro nature are to be estimated by its highest actual attainments in the most favored individuals. Two of the noblest races of history have come from an ancestry less promising than our Southern freedmen—the Israelites and our own ancestors. He would be a daring prophet who, in face of these examples, and of the instances of moral greatness actually produced by this race, should assert that something noble in character, some unique type of spiritual excellence, some splendid order of manhood, may not yet emerge from this now degraded and unpromising race. What the nature, the moral capacity of the American negro is, future ages will determine; and if we believe that God made him and gave him his nature, with all its unrealized possibilities, it surely cannot be hard for us to believe that there is for him a glorious future of moral and spiritual character. Our Hope in Schools and Churches.