There is need of the most earnest work. Of the 876 convicts in the State penitentiary, according to the last official report, 782 are colored persons, and it is estimated that four-fifths of these committed their crimes under the influence of liquor. This fact in the criminal list is a sure index of what is generally prevalent. Intemperance is alarmingly widespread among the colored people in Mississippi. The habit, too, is fixed within the churches of this people to a shocking extent. Church membership is no sort of guarantee that an individual is not habitually intemperate, even to the degree of drunkenness. When we consider all this and the terrible, degrading influence resting over the children and youth, the need of specifically _temperance work_ seems almost equal to that of Christian education. What has been done in this direction by Tougaloo University through its teachers, we take great pride and satisfaction in looking over and summing up. During the past five years this institution has been represented in temperance work in the State by no less than 150 different individuals converted to the cause while here, and becoming themselves signers of the pledge to total abstinence. These have done their temperance work in connection with the teaching of children in the common schools, and many of them in various fields. The little army has thus been able to reach a very great number of children and parents and homes. Their work was very direct. They taught the principles of temperance, and had their total abstinence pledge for young and old to sign. Nor was this all. All of these workers felt the necessity of exercising from year to year as they returned to their old places, or as circumstances made it possible, a watchful care over those induced to sign. One year the total number of signers obtained by our students was not less than 1,300. But this does not include the whole of the work done. Many of our students not as yet teachers have been energetic in their efforts to bring the subject to the attention of friends and neighbors where they have lived and to win these over to the cause, often gaining a greater influence and success than many who worked as teachers. [Illustration: NEGRO CABINS.] * * * * * “HIGHER LAW” AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHT ON OUR SIDE. BY REV. E. T. HOOKER, CHARLESTON.