Following hard upon the above action in the interest of the colored man, this General Conference paid special attention to its work so grandly begun in the sunny South. While the discussion of the status of the colored delegates elicited much animation, the restrictions were removed from the conferences of the Church in the South, irrespective of color, by a vote of 197 to 15. All our benevolent societies were instructed to redouble their diligence to meet the exigencies of the case; our Book Concerns were to publish one or more papers adapted to the new order of things within the South; transfers, if needed, were to be sent into this fruitful field; training-schools and theological schools were ordered for the special training of the colored people of the South within our Church and without, if accepted. The bishops were requested to give the colored work special episcopal supervision. As a finale of the action of that General Conference, an “enabling act” for the establishment of the third annual conference among our colored members was passed, with the provision that in every case the _rights_ of every preacher were to be fully and carefully, as well as impartially, considered. The white preachers and teachers who were sent by the Church into the South to carry out this plan of work were, in too many cases, not only subjected to insult, but cruel scourgings and false imprisonment, as if ostracism was not cruel and wicked punishment enough. But many of those thus treated were men and women of God, and therefore consistent but firm and true heroes and heroines. Dr. Walden (now bishop), in an address, Aug. 13, 1883, at the anniversary of the Freedmen’s Aid Society, spoke of this work. The following needs no comment, as he speaks of the period in our work in the South at which we now are, and we insert it here as a retrospect: “Two courses were open—one to delay employing colored preachers until they could be educated, the other to put these untutored men to work at once. No people ever needed the gospel more than did the freed people. Standing in the midst of new relations, the possessors of a new-found freedom for which they had never been trained, they needed both the restraints and the inspiration of the gospel. The Wesleyan prescience of our Church recognized this need, and at the same time the fact that these unlearned preachers, if divinely called, could so tell the story of the Cross as to benefit their people. The lives of many of these men had been an unbroken period of slave-toil; but the sequel proves that they knew enough of the saving power of Christ and the fullness of his love to instruct their hearers in the way of life, and we now see that their relation to this work was not unlike to that of the first of Wesley’s lay preachers to their work among their own classes in England.