[THE COLORED MAN.—Fifteen years ago Gen. O. O. Howard asked a colored school, “What message will you send to the friends North?” Richard Wright, at that time a lad of thirteen, responded, “_Tell ’em we’s risin’ sir_.” Mr. Wright has since graduated from Atlanta University, and for several years has been engaged in teaching and editing a local paper in Georgia. Those who heard his admirable address had abundant evidence that his statement has been verified in his own case, at least. We regret that we can give our readers so small a part of it.] You cannot imagine how much it rejoices me to stand before those who helped to shape the events whose tremendous logic forced the great patriot and philanthropist, Abraham Lincoln, to sign that necessary war measure which resulted in striking the shackles from the four million unfortunate human beings whom I have the honor to represent at this meeting. I come to tell you that your labors have not been in vain. The colored man, whose cause you have espoused, is worthy of your efforts. Numerically, the colored people form about one-seventh of this great nation. Their natural increase is greater, probably, than that of any other branch of the American family. In the South they constitute nearly one-half of the population, and in the cotton states even more. Nine-tenths of the manual or menial labor of the South is done by colored men. Freedom has not made them lazy, as has been stated by their enemies. Besides making ten million more bales of cotton than during any fifteen years of slavery, they have, during the last fifteen years of freedom, acquired in the South over one hundred million dollars worth of property. That eagerness for an education which characterized them when your first missionaries were put in the field has not left them. In 1878, Gen. Eaton reported as being in the public schools of the South 675,150 colored children, and about 100 schools devoted to secondary, normal, collegiate and professional training among the six and a-half million colored citizens. Such, in brief, is the strength of a people who are to help shape the destiny of this republic. Ignorance, intellectual and moral, is our main weakness, a curse for which our forefathers were not responsible, but for which we, of the rising generation, are compelled to atone under the manacles of political proscription and religious and social ostracism. It could hardly be expected that the slaveholders of the South would in their straitened circumstances undertake the education of those whom they had looked upon as their property taken violently from them. So the North, as it has abolished slavery, must also abolish ignorance.