It is evident, then, that education is at a low ebb in that dark State of Alabama; and such as we have, bear in mind, is the growth of the last twenty years. It is an infusion of Northern ideas and Northern civilization; and these first friends of learning must be its friends still. Just now I remember calling but a few weeks since at an important point where two railroads cross each other, where iron and coal lie side by side, where different forms of industry,—blast furnaces and machine shops—are going up, and it is a place of great prospective importance that we ought at once to occupy. I called upon the county superintendent of education, a rebel colonel, I think six feet and more in height. He seemed to look down upon me. I am sure he did when I announced myself from Talladega. He at once branded me with “N.T.”—that means a Negro Teacher, with two g’s in the word Negro. I asked him concerning the education of the black man in that growing town. He said he knew very little of it; he paid out ninety dollars of public money for a teacher, but he knew nothing more. Said he, “We don’t think much of nigger education here.” It almost took my breath away. I said to him there might be others in the town who had different views of negro education, and asked him if there was not some friend of liberty with whom I might speak; and he replied, “We have not much of the nigger about us;” and I went out. Now it is very evident, my friends, that the work of education, so imperative, must be carried forward by Northern consecration still. Well, if you now turn from our intellectual need to our industrial wants, I can show you a State whose mines and hills are full of treasure, where forest trees grow in rank luxuriance, where our cotton fields are sufficient to wrap half America in their folds. And yet our homes are mean and miserable, and dark and dirty, and there is physical want and physical poverty and physical distress. You tell me the black man is indolent. I say yes, but he is among a lazy generation. You tell me the black man is thriftless, and I say yes, but he is among a shiftless race. It is true that the industrial idea of those Southern States must be carried forward, and we must do it. But the wants that I have referred to thus far are not our most serious need. We come to manhood, to morality, to Christian virtue, and there, brethren, we are just where you might suspect. Bear in mind, it is but a few years since slavery, the sum and the mother of villainies, was sustained by the law and defended by the pulpit. The piety and the morality of the colored people have been strangely divorced. As was said here yesterday, we are not opposed by skepticism. I grant it; we can subscribe to the whole catechism and take it in bodily, with one exception, and that exception is the Ten Commandments.