wrong to the blacks to compel them to suffer in the South or flee to Kansas. It is unfair to the South to put them to the dreadful alternative of suffering or doing such great wrongs. It is a shame for an enlightened nation to keep itself thus embroiled, to the hindrance of its prosperity and the jeopardy of its peace. Let me show you my _third_ picture, which presents “the more excellent way.” In the foreground is a school-house and near by is a church. Around and in the distance are pleasant little homes and well cultivated lands. These are the instruments for working the needed change; they will make the Freedman intelligent, virtuous and industrious; will give him property and responsible interest in the welfare of the State. But you say this is a long process. Admitted; but what if there is no other? A slave can be changed into a freeman in an hour, but to change him into an intelligent man will take years; to transform millions of ignorant, cringing and penniless men into intelligent and responsible citizens and Christians will require generations. The acorn favorably planted will germinate into an oak in a few days, and though small, it is a real oak; but it will be many years before its broad branching arms will give wide shelter, or its girth and strength of stem will yield heavy timber. A few such plants started in good soil and carefully tended will come forward rapidly, but the wide growth on arid plains or in cold swamps will long remain dwarfs. The rapid progress of some of these colored people under adequate training shows what _can_ be done; the backwardness of the mass shows what _must_ be done. Here is the call to this Association to bear its part in this great work in America. It is no light task and no short work. The North is once more aroused to its magnitude as well as its necessity, and in that great effort the better portion of the South is ready to join us. God forbid that any delusive scheme or guilty indifference should hinder its steady progress. The wide Atlantic rolls between America and Africa, but a strange connecting wire links the two together. The battery at yonder end was charged with the dreadful electricity that arose from burning villages, slaughtered people and captured slaves. The sounds that swept along that wire were the wails of the “middle passage.” The delivery at this end was the toil, the tears, and the blood of the slave plantation. That connection is now broken. Does God mean to establish no other? Yes, the battery is to be placed in America, charged with the light of its learning and religion; the hum of the wires will be the song of the returning heralds of salvation, and the delivery will be the breaking forth of Gospel light in benighted Africa. Such a change is worthy of God’s wonder-working grace, and, thanks to His name, it has begun.