4. _The relation of our work to the future of education in the South._ The justification of all Northern missionary teaching in the South has been that it was designed to accomplish what the Southern people were not prepared to do themselves. To whatever extent they may in the future take up our work, it will still be our mission to maintain that helpful leadership which it has been our privilege to exercise from the beginning. Our institutions should be the best and do the best work of any in the South. We should be the first to discern the peculiar needs of Southern pupils and the first to introduce whatever is new and excellent in educational appliances. We ought, for instance, to have at once industrial departments connected with all our larger institutions. Every normal and college graduate should be able to use intelligently either the wood-working or the iron-working tools; and the same expenditure of time and money which the Harvard and Yale boys make in learning to wield the oar and the bat would accomplish this much desired end. Already our institutions are being visited by Southern teachers eager to witness the advanced methods of teaching already introduced. We should always be able to reward such visitors by showing them something which they have not seen before. Above all, we should send out from our institutions such noble specimens of young manhood and womanhood as shall prove a stimulus to the whole educational work in the South. The destiny of the colored race is to be largely determined by the character of the young men and women now crowding forward into active life. The immediate future will demand all our resources, and more, to save these young people. In the more distant future, our success as influential leaders in education will depend largely upon the promptness with which our institutions are _now_ put upon a substantial basis. Every consideration of past success and of present and future need enforces our plea that these endowments should be provided at once. * * * * *