A third call comes to the Association—the call of this hour. The early enthusiasm in the Freedmen work subsided. This new call springs from no sudden revival of that enthusiasm, but rather from that “sober second thought” that follows the reaction from it, and which comes from the pressure of hard, stern facts. I cannot, therefore, explain the present aspect of affairs without reverting to the cause of that decline of interest. The zeal of Christian people slackened when they found the work among the Freedmen could not all be finished in fifteen or twenty years. This was the general expectation at the outset, strange as it may seem—nay, amusing, if the mistake were not so serious. The orthodox and well-ordered Christian man has no doubt of the need of _perpetual_ help for the West, and he cheerfully aids it through the accredited channels, the Bible, Tract, Sunday-school, Education, College and Church Building Societies, and especially the honored Home Missionary Board; though those Western settlers have behind them the culture of more than a thousand years, with the personal education of New England homes, schools and churches, and also the business training among the shrewd and thrifty people. But these Negroes, who have behind them only untold ages of barbarism and oppression, and whose homes are huts, whose schools are few, whose ministers are ignorant, who have no capital and no business training—when these people loom up before this good Christian man, he is amazed and discouraged if a few years, a few books and a few teachers do not end all responsibility for them. His creed in regard to them is as brief as his patience, and may be given in the words of the poet: “They need but little here below, Nor need that little long.” In like manner the well-ordered citizen lost his enthusiasm for the Freedmen. He had been so long under the strain of anxiety about the war that he was weary of it and of everything that reminded him of it. Then there followed a succession of events in regard to the Freedmen that played upon his hopes and fears till he was doubly weary of them.