But having hoped against hope, till hope deferred and poverty had saddened their hearts, most of them have turned their minds to the soil, which now promises “seed to the sower and bread to the eater.” On every hand “the valleys are covered over with corn,” and God, the poor man’s Friend, has just granted the tillers of the ground “a plentiful rain,” which causes “the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice.” The present prospect of a bountiful harvest has greatly inspired our people to labor and to appreciate honest toil, and to remember that the great mass of the Freedmen will make better plowmen than Presidents, and better sowers than Senators. The pinching poverty which drove a few idle and ignorant Freedmen to Indiana, Kansas and Africa, has taught those who had the good sense to stay at home, that God will not bless idleness and ignorance among any people. Most of the Freedmen have decided to buy land and labor on it; to build houses and dwell in them, “and to plant gardens and eat the fruit of them”; to seek the peace of the country and the cities where God has caused them to be carried away captives; and to remember that in the peace and prosperity of this country shall they have peace. * * * * * OUR SCHOOLS AND THE COMMON SCHOOL SYSTEM. The settlers of New England showed their uncommon common sense by the early establishment of Harvard and Yale—the nursing mothers of the common school system which has made these States what they are. These colleges are not the ripened fruit of the common schools, but the creators of them. For these colleges, we are indebted to a class of men among the Pilgrim Fathers, educated in the universities of the old world, a class not to be found among the colored people of the South, and because of which alone, if for no other reason, their condition differs immensely from that of the Freedmen, who have no ability to create the instruments by which they can be lifted up from the degraded condition in which slavery left them. The deep-seated prejudice of the Southern white against the fact of negro education, his bitter unwillingness to see the experiment tried, coupled with his scornful incredulity that anything worth the effort could be accomplished, made it certain that those most deeply concerned, because of the new relation these people sustained to them, in the elevation, through schools, of the negro, would originate no efforts to this end. This gospel, like every other, must be sent to those who are to be specially benefited by it, and must be sustained, like all missionary enterprises, by those who know its value, until it can vindicate itself to those to whom it is sent.