Various

“ The field for educated whites is narrow enough, and there is no opening for a learned negro, except the pulpit and the school bench, and these two avocations are now crowded to suffocation. Experience has taught that when you educate a negro you incapacitate him for manual labor; and to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water for the superior race is all the sphere that the African ever has or ever will creditably fill. ”

“ There is a New South that is becoming awake to the possibilities, the opportunities, and the duties, especially of the dominant race, but he shuts his eyes to serious facts, and to many sad ones, who is led to think that the movements which we herald with gladness are the thought and feeling of any large significance, or that they can do the work to which the American Missionary Association is consecrated. ”

“ Every day and every hour of the day we touch thousands and millions of China and Africa, and might, if we would, prepare them to be, respectively, the saviours of their country. It is not only possible, but it ought to be an easy thing to raise up out of the seven million blacks, out of the one hundred thousand Chinese, and out of the two hundred and seventy thousand Indians, teachers and preachers enough to give the gospel, with all its accompanying light and power, to the unnumbered myriads they represent still sitting in the shadow of death. ”

“ The “Mountain Work,” which the A. M. A. has undertaken in the South, has a tendency to make those who engage in it enthusiastic, and we in the field sometimes almost mistrust that even our well-informed officers in New York, with all their appreciation of the need and greatness of the work before us, are accustomed to make a discount of seventy-five per cent. on all we write them. On the other hand, we know we have not been, and shall not be, able to make anyone who has not spent weeks here realize one quarter of the real needs of this field. ”

“ I have been thinking also how we should train our people in benevolence. We must train the children. I have a little girl, to whom I gave a red cent and wished to teach her something. So I asked her to what she would give it—to the sick, or for the preacher, or for sending missionaries? “What do they send missionaries for?” she asked. “To teach the people God’s Word who have not heard it,” I answered. “But what will one cent do?” she replied. Said I, “If one hundred little girls should give a cent each, it would make a dollar.” My little girl had learned to sing and play a little on the organ. ”

“ Said the Texan: “There always have been, and there always will be, certain besetting sins, and you cannot abolish them by law. People have kept getting drunk ever since Eve got drunk in the Garden of Eden, and I reckon they always will, and you can’t prohibit it by law.”
Poor old mother Eve! The apple must have had hard cider in it. This was the argument of a lawyer, and fairly averages the arguments urged throughout the State against prohibition. Agitation and fair discussion are all that are needed to convince every man that the thing to do with crime is to prohibit it. ”

“ Now, with these simple remarks, with no desire to excite you, I again express the hope that the time will come when in the North, South, East and West you will be recognized as a race and as American citizens according as you behave yourselves and not according to your color and condition. ”

“ Early in the afternoon two white teachers in the Clark University entered the tent with eight or ten negro girls, who are students at the school, and seated themselves. Soon after the party entered the tent, ladies and gentlemen began arriving and in a short time the tent was crowded. Every seat except those reserved for the colored people was taken and many persons were standing up. One of the ushers, with a view to supplying seats for some who were standing, went to the negro girls and asked them to move to the seats set apart for their race. ”

“ While we are grateful to note the fact that the thoughts of men are widening, we know that there is need of faith and patience, because there remains much land to be possessed. One need not go far from what is hopeful to find enough to excite concern for the future, and to urge him to relax no zeal to hasten the day when Christ shall make all things new. ”

“ Under the escort of distinguished citizens of Nashville, during the present year we have had the honor of visits from Judge Kelly, of Philadelphia, “the Father of the House of Representatives,” and his traveling companions; Charles Dudley Warner and the Harper party, and others. These occasions are always full of interest, and the University becomes an object-lesson to teach and illustrate the possibilities of Negro education; but Senator Sherman’s visit was in every way so pleasant and significant that it will long be a fragrant memory and quickening inspiration to both faculty and students. ”

“ So it is unkindness to the negro to lift him above his position.” In the same paper, a second article declares that the colored schools are rapidly “becoming nuisances.”
Now, it would not be just to say that the sentiments quoted above are those of the New South. They are not. It would be equally erroneous to deny that these views would be accepted by the great body of people living in the South. The New South to many means simply a new South for white people. Those who have had the misfortune to be the children of slavery are to most as yet not in the newness. ”

“ Tong is a good Christian boy,—as a pupil and as a singer equal to any China boy I ever had. When he talked with me he trembled like a leaf, saying, ‘I do so love your Jesus, but my family be angry. What shall I do?’”
Jee Gam has a little group of pupils in our Central school so eager to study the Bible that they often remain an extra hour (from 9:30 to 10:30 P. M.) for instruction from him. One in this group, as deeply interested and [176] as intelligent and constant as any, is a brother to two of our Chinese brethren, but has never himself confessed Christ. ”

“ The whole world opens out in beauty. Blossoms, songs, abounding life, are everywhere. What a hint to close-clasped pocket-books to come out from their hiding places and join with the lilacs and apple trees and the birds and the forests and the fields in making everybody happy with their generous outflow. ”

“ Here, in 1835, the terrible massacre of the American troops crimsoned the prairie grass. But it was the bloody baptism of freedom! The fetters of Mexican tyranny were broken. To-day this village is the centre of a large and exceedingly fertile farming region. The A. M. A. church is feeble, but full of hope and confidence. They own their meeting-house, and are thrifty and prosperous. They are pushing towards self-support. One of the church members teaches a day school. So in this out-of-the-way village on the prairies of Texas the A. M. A. is sowing the seed of a better Christian progress. ”

“ In most of them there is no day-school worthy of the name, no Sunday-school, no prayer-meeting, no educated ministry, no churches in which pure religion is taught or systematic work [173] of any kind is done. The majority of the people are good-hearted and respond readily to kind words and acts of love. They live mostly in wretched, windowless log-cabins, and know few of the blessings of a Christian land, having no luxuries and few of those things which are generally considered necessities. Physically, mentally and spiritually they need teaching and elevating. ”

“ It ought to be occupied at once, for people are beginning to come in advance of the railroad and now is by far the easiest and cheapest time to start the work.
Is there not some man of consecrated wealth who will assume the financial part of establishing at once a mission in this place? A neat, inexpensive [174] little chapel, a school building, a young minister and his wife, a teacher and his wife, would make a beginning from which great things would be sure to result. ”

“ Every A. M. A. preacher and teacher was pronounced and energetic in his advocacy of this sound temperance principle. The influence of these Christian workers will be felt in the coming election. The colored vote is an important factor in the settlement of this question, and our A. M. A. workers will do their utmost to make it solid for prohibition.
The Sunday laws in Texas are strict and well enforced. Even at the news counter at the hotels, cigars and tobacco are not sold. Congregational leaven, or some other moral force, has agitated society most healthfully. ”

“ Their thirst for knowledge has been greatly increased by the obstacles previously thrown in their way. There are several excellent colored universities in the South. Fisk University at Nashville is especially good. The young men and women attending it are bright and very intelligent. The young white people of the South must look well to their laurels or their black neighbors will soon lead them in the race for mental improvement. ”

“ Each day the classes were more interesting and pleasing, every scholar doing his best work, not because he was obliged to, but for the simple reason that his teacher as she went along, instilled the love of study in his mind. ”

“ Both were wrong, of course; people usually are who see one side. There were two sides to that shield.
The point of view has to do with what one sees. For example, when Rev. Doctor Field went South, the shield which he looked at on the way was burnished gold. He saw it. He wrote a book about it, which was honorable to his heart and to his eyesight. Everything was lovely and of good report down South. It was faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of all was charity. Then Editor Grady came to New York and told us in eloquence and imagination of the New South. ”

“ The case which has most deeply interested me and called forth my earnest prayer is that of a Chinese physician in Marysville. I made his acquaintance about two weeks ago, on my recent visit to that mission. He has attended our school for more than a year, and is one of the most faithful of the pupils. He shrinks from no service by which he can help on the work. He is well read in Chinese—perhaps beyond any of our brethren, and is regarded as specially skillful as a surgeon after the Chinese ways. ”

“ The railroads are pushing their way among the mountains and immigration will add more and more to the population, and vastly more to the wealth. Villages are springing up, cities will soon follow, and before many years this region will be filled with an enterprising and well-to-do people.
Now is the time for the Christian influences which are to mould the future history of this people for good, to be set in motion from strategic points. ”

“ Churches, public halls and school houses are filled almost nightly with interested and excited audiences listening to the discussion of their political duties concerning this great moral question. The leading temperance advocates have confident hopes that this coming election will wheel the Lone Star State into line with the goodly number of prohibitory States. In the hotels, on the streets, in railway carriages, everywhere, prohibition is the absorbing question. ”

“ A widow, to whom a watch was the chief material reminder of her husband, heard the appeal of the American Missionary Association, and having no money to give, sends that watch that it may be sold in the market and the money go into our work. ”

“ There are a great many schools, of one kind and another, that have been started at the South among the colored people by private parties, on a purely independent basis. Complaint comes to us frequently that circulars and letters begging for funds with which to carry on these independent enterprises are being continually received, and that funds are diverted from our treasury on that account. ”

“ To drop her is to let her fall into a life of prostitution—almost to doom her to it. He might send her to one of our Mission Homes for Women, but she is not disposed to go. Four or five years—as I understand it—they have lived together, and while, so far as his own comfort or pleasure is concerned, I believe he would give her up, would it be right thus to dispose of her? It is a knot not easily untied, a tangle not easily cleared. ”

“ And yet the white people of our State, through the medium of politicians and office-seekers, are taking an enormous load of taxation on their shoulders (sic) to make convicts and vagabonds of the only class of labor they now have. To substantiate this statement we have only to refer to [163] Athens before and since public schools were established, and the history of our city is the history of every place in the South where the whites have consented to bear the burthen of educating the negro. ”