The work of education and evangelization among the Freedmen in this State was never more hopeful. By the provisions of the new constitution which was adopted at the recent election, the rate of taxation has been greatly reduced, and as a direct consequence, the appropriation for school purposes will be correspondingly cut down. The free colored schools will be the first to be struck by this wave of retrenchment. Many schools, especially in the country parishes, will be closed, or, at the best, be maintained for a very brief period in the year. New Orleans will feel this matter as keenly as the country, for the amount of taxation is strictly regulated by the new constitution. Only special gifts can possibly keep the schools up to the present standard. One of the most prominent educators in the city said to me, “I would not raise unnecessarily the cry of alarm, but a crisis is surely near at hand with our public schools.” The colored Normal School will certainly be discontinued. The Peabody fund will probably not be available for Louisiana another year. All these events, so unpropitious to the free school system of Louisiana, and so deeply to be deplored, render our work all the more necessary, and our prospect of enlarged usefulness the brighter. When we see the grand opportunity opening before our beloved University—an opportunity which has not the remotest resemblance to the fictitious and dreamy—we try to forget the plaintive words, “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,” and rally our courage by the more inspiring prophecy, “The morning light is breaking.” When the glorious work of enlargement begins, will it not be in order to start at the Gulf of Mexico and gradually work up? We rather approve of that plan and are quite ready for it. CHURCH WORK IN LOUISIANA. “We hold our own, and something more,” is the word that comes up from the churches of our Association. Our annual meeting will be held at _Terrebonne_, the first Wednesday in April, and the brethren are eagerly anticipating it. Congregationalism is a plant of slow growth among the colored people, not from want of adaptation, but from lack of money to push it into fields now unoccupied or uncultivated. Money is needed to give new enterprises substantial encouragement in their difficult “beginnings”—to tide the pastors past the _starvation_ point—to give them “foothold” till strength comes to them in the natural growth of a good enterprise.