There are signs—and some of them very manifest—of the capacity of the Freedmen for great moral strength. Have you read Judge Tourgee’s reference to the fact that when the opportunity was given, after the war, for the negroes to register themselves for marriage—to be married by the laws of the State in wholesale—how eagerly they availed themselves of that opportunity, that they might have the form and reality of marriage, and the stamp of legitimacy upon their children? The negro knows what a home means; he has been wanting it; now he will have in time as clean a home as you or I may have. What do you think I discovered a few days ago in one of the historic towns of New England? A friend looking over the records of that old town, came upon the list of baptisms, and this fact came out: in early Puritan days in a town not twenty-five miles from Boston more children were born out of wedlock than in wedlock; and the Puritan says to the negro, “You don’t know what a home is.” Wait;—give him a chance. You see how it is with regard to his industries. Men say he is lazy: why does he go to work as soon as he leaves the land which induces laziness? The reports come from Kansas that he is thrifty, that he is putting his hand to the plow, that he is doing the work he is given there to do. Individuals taken as types of the race are declaring their capacity for strong industrial development. You know his record in matters of education; you know he is beginning to make himself, so far as he has the chance anywhere, a power in citizenship. I believe that this question of morality will settle itself, that the negro can at least show, under right training, an average development in the morals of religion. One question then remains: What is the true way of approach to this religious question of the South? Something has already been done through the strong, patient work, known as the _church work_ of this Association—taking the products of the school, young men and women as trained in the schools, and organizing them into churches, for the churches are merely the outgrowth of the schools. The old churches of the South are not fit to be transferred into the churches of this Association. We are all the weaker for any church that might be allowed to come in in that way. The greater approach—and that which I believe the Association, so soon as it has the means, will endeavor to carry out—is in the larger training of leaders, to meet what will be within ten or twenty years the enormous demand for Christian leadership through the South. In other words, give to the millions of the colored race at the South a sufficient number of trained, educated, common-sense ministers, and they will make that people in half a century the joy and the pride of our land.