The A. M. A. has been guided to marked changes. Its original aim was to do mission work free from all possible complications with slavery. It did not, as I understand the matter, assume that all other Boards were in _favor_ of slavery, while it alone was opposed to it, but its founders felt that the time had come when their consciences could be no longer satisfied unless their missionary contributions and labors constituted an active and public protest against slavery. The breadth of this principle included all forms of missionary efforts, and hence the constitution of the Association provided for both home and foreign work, and in its greatest enlargement on this basis, it had about 110 home missionaries in the field, and its foreign missions extended to West Africa, Jamaica, the Sandwich Islands, Siam, the Copts in Egypt, the Indians in the United States, and the refugees in Canada. But the war changed the whole aspect of affairs for the Association. It set free the millions of slaves and gave the opportunity for reaching them directly with schools and the Gospel. The Association at once concentrated its efforts upon these people, having shortly before or soon after the war abandoned or transferred all its missions—home and foreign—except the Mendi, and this was retailed as cognate to its work among the Freedmen in this country. But now as we look back on the history of that mission, so useful up to the date when we surrendered our other foreign missions, and so comparatively unsuccessful since, we are constrained to ask if it, too, should not then have been relinquished.