Neither are we to leave out of account the fact that this Association has the advantage of experience. Its work at first was necessarily tentative. It had no pioneers and no precedents to guide it. It was compelled to originate methods and prove them by the test of time. It is high testimony to the wisdom of the fathers that they made so few and such slight mistakes. But slight and few as they were, they will not be repeated. There is no occasion for further experiment. The work, and how best to do it, are both things which are fully known. The management of this Association understands the Southern question better than the Administration at Washington. It would be a fool's policy in either patriot or Christian to dismiss from service, or limit in efficiency by shrinkage of funds or lessening of interest, an organization with such an illustrious record, which has been so honored of God and man, and which has such capacity for manifolding its successes and pushing on the growth already reached to consummate blossom and needful and opulent fruitage. No, no, brethren, the time has not yet come to remand the Association to inaction, and neither has the time come for the American church to omit one dollar of its givings, or one utterance of its prayers, or one impulse of its enthusiasm for the right and complete and final solution of the most immediate and pressing problem with which we are set face to face. In December, 1620, a little vessel entered Plymouth harbor, having on board the devoted company of the Pilgrims. To human judgment she seemed of small account, as she lay there, crusted with spray and weather beaten with her wrestlings with the winter sea, and of hardly greater account apparently was the handful of shivering men and women who landed on the inhospitable shore. But the coming of the Pilgrim ship and the Pilgrim company to a port for which they had not sailed was the inauguration of a new era in government, ethics, social life and religion, and whatever is best and purest in our nationality to-day, traces its lineage back to that far past and seemingly insignificant event, and our largest hope for the future depends for its realization on the further and perfect development of the possibilities of which that event was the seed and prophecy. In June, 1839, another vessel, described in the journals of that day as "a long, low, black schooner," was seen lying off the coast of Connecticut. She proved to be the "Amistad," a Spanish craft, having on board some forty slaves, who had risen and overpowered their captors. Like her predecessor of Plymouth, through the treachery of the management, she had been steered to a port for which she was not bound. As the coming of the "Mayflower" opened one era in the history of the continent, so the arrival of the "Friendship" was the beginning of another. The Spanish Government claimed the slaves as their property, and the American Government arraigned them for murder on the high seas.