It is to the hundreds of young people that go out every year from these colleges, and such as these, teaching in public and in private schools pupils of their own color, that this gain in the battle with illiteracy at the South is due. They are the children of the light, who are waging this victorious battle with the powers of darkness. There has been great improvement, of course, in the public schools of the South during this decade; but in this improvement the whites have shared as well as the blacks; the great reasons for the more rapid advancement of the blacks are, first, that they are more eager for instruction than the ignorant whites, and, secondly, that they are better supplied with teachers—missionaries of education, who not only do much to supply the demand for knowledge already existing, but who do still more to increase this demand. We come back, now, from our brief excursion into this fruitful and fascinating realm of percentages, to confront again that large mass of illiteracy that lies athwart the path of this nation. Huge it is, but, thank God, it looks not so vast and unmanageable as once it seemed. It is growing; but the nation is growing faster; relatively it is decreasing. It is far too formidable yet to be let alone; so long as ignorance rules almost one-third of our rulers in all of these sixteen States, no man has any right to relax his vigilance or abate his energies. What these figures show is simply this, that work tells; that our money is not wasted; that our labor is not in vain in the Lord; that if we will only keep it up with our giving and our working, if we will only see to it that these same agencies that have done this grand work in the past ten years are fully equipped to carry it on with increasing vigor, we may hope to gain in the next ten years still more rapid and decisive victories. The word that comes to every friend of the American Missionary Association, to every benefactor in deed or in purpose of these noble schools, is the word that Grant sent to Sheridan after the battle of Five Forks: “Push things!” You’ve got ’em running, these legions of ignorance and darkness; up and after them; harry them on the flank, press them in the rear, till they plunge like the herd of devil-pestered hogs, into the Gulf of Mexico. You have got the forces to do this work. All you want to do is to give them a better equipment. You want no new machinery; you only want more power; no new organizations, but reinforcements of those in the field.