In behalf of visitors from the Raymond Excursion, it gives me great pleasure to express to the officers and students of Straight University our thanks for the interesting reception we have received at their hands. We have come from a long way off, for sight-seeing, and the study of the country, but here we find something more than the wild mountains, and desolate plains, and border towns, that are to make up so much of the interest of our journey. Through institutions like this, a problem suggested to me in one of your streets will find solution. I visited the Republican State Convention in session, to see ex-Governor Kellogg, whom I had known in his boyhood among the Green Mountains, and who was one of {pg 212} the officers of the convention. While there I listened to several speeches from colored men, which, for clearness of thought and pathos of oratory, would have done credit to any public speaker in the country. I have since learned, with great pleasure, that several of these gentlemen were graduates of this University. On leaving the convention, when scarcely a block away, I met a well-dressed gentleman, and naturally fell into conversation about the convention. The gentleman claimed to have inherited the blood of Boston, but had lived twenty years in New Orleans. With respect to the convention, he said: "I tell you, sir, the white people here will never consent to be governed by a lot of ignorant Negroes, like those in that convention!" I have thought on this statement, and coming here, I find its solution. Knowledge is power, whether its possessor be white or black, and unless the white people of the South make the education of their children more of a paramount interest than heretofore, they will find the learning and muscle, the precedents of wealth, combined in the colored race. The rural population will find that they need for themselves and their children a better knowledge than can be acquired from the court-house, saloon, or the village tavern. It is an interesting thought, that these students will go from this institution back to their low-down homes on the borders of rice fields and cotton plantations, where their fathers and mothers have toiled in slavery, and by an inspiration that is divine, will dissipate the dark memories of the past, and will show, by precept and example, that sanctification of spirit and purity of life will shape the destiny of their race for coming time. Again we thank you for this interview. JOHN M. STEARNS * * * * * VALUED APPRECIATION.