The Kansas refugees are not the most hopeless of the colored people; they, at least, have the energy to flee. But there are large numbers that are content to sink to the bottom and stay there; they are the water in the hold that threatens to drag down the ship. Yet, thank God, there is still another portion, not so large, but more hopeful and enterprising than either, that get homes and educate their children. These are the ones whose children crowd our schools; they are the hope of the race; they have the right ideal--that an education, of heart as well as head, is the rod of God in the hand of man; that makes character, wields the ballot, wins the home and works the land! This is the class to help first, and this is the way to help--give them the good school and the pure church. The emergency was too great to brook delay. This Association did not wait. It struck in at this point at the outset and has stuck to it ever since. It is on the right track, as is now admitted on all sides. Pres. Hayes utters the practical sentiment of the nation, and he but echoes what Judge Tourgee, the author of “A Fool’s Errand,” representing the radical opinions of the North, and Rev. Dr. Ruffner, Supt. of Public Instruction of Virginia, representing the conservative views of the South, had already uttered, that there is no way of making the Freedmen safe members of society but by educating them. To the colored people themselves nothing is more inspiring and helpful than the kind of work achieved by the American Missionary Association in your behalf. When these people recall the little handful of their number that cowered under the guns of Fort Monroe for protection and the little school opened there, and now see the large buildings at Hampton, the broad farm and the busy workshops in which their children are trained; when they remember the scowling looks of the masters in Atlanta when Gen. Sherman had gone, and now see the Atlanta University, visited by those old masters--and the best of them--who come away with commendations so warm, that the state grants $8,000 a year to the education of their children, when they think of the timid crowds of their people in Nashville at the close of the war, and now see Jubilee Hall, sung into existence by their children, who have called forth the tribute of tears from crowned heads abroad as well as people at home; when, in short, they see all over the South such schools taught by teachers from the North, and behold their children going forth year by year, by scores and hundreds to teach and to preach, this is to them the manna that sustains them in their wilderness journey. Will you help us to multiply that bread, as Jesus did when He fed the multitudes, saying--“give ye them to eat”? Multiply it not only for the thrifty and enterprising, but multiply it for the discouraged ones now ready to flee to Kansas! Yea, multiply it so abundantly that the most hopeless and degraded