We are steadily but slowly coming to the realization of the idea that was the inspiration of the American Missionary Association's school system--Christian colleges and Normal schools for the training of leaders, and Christian preparatory schools to furnish them with the right kind of material. The South is year by year, as its financial ability increases and its public sentiment improves, doing more for the rudimental instruction of its children. It is the duty of the State to provide elementary education for every child within its borders, and to that point the Southern States must one day come; but just in proportion as they come to that point, the necessities for our work increase. The demand for Christian teachers and preachers and professional men in all ranks at the South will grow as facilities for the elementary education of the children multiply. Our aim is not only to save the land from ignorance, but to save it from godless intelligence. Infidelity is as much the enemy of free institutions as ignorance; and when the children are intelligent, an ignorant leadership is almost as effective as an infidel leadership to raise up an infidel people; so that, as intelligence spreads among the youth of the South, we are placed under accumulating obligations, by virtue of our loyalty to the kingdom of our Lord, and by virtue of our interest in the perpetuity of republican institutions, to strengthen, enlarge and multiply this work. Of course, just now, and for a great many years to come, by far the greater part of our school work must be in the lower grades of instruction. So long as it can be said, that in the Southern States eighty per cent. of the colored and thirty per cent. of the white population are illiterate; that there are not educational facilities enough to furnish fifty per cent. of the children with even a chance to learn their letters; that there are whole communities and sections in which there are no schools whatever; that there are thousands and tens of thousands of children and youth who would be glad to go to school did they have opportunity; so long we must continue to furnish elementary instruction in all our schools, and as far as possible to open such small schools as may meet the present but transient exigency, to be dropped, as we have the seven common schools above referred to, when, from whatever cause, the necessity for them has passed away. The Executive Committee desires to emphasize and to have the constituents of the American Missionary Association keep it constantly before them, that as the cause and means of popular education extend in the South, the necessity for the work of the Association becomes stronger and stronger.