of the plantation known as Broad Neck, Hanover.

The principal benefactor was Mr. Collis P. Huntington of New
York, who was pleased to make a contribution of $12,000
toward this worthy and necessary charity.

We have need to felicitate ourselves as members of a great though
oppressed race, that an Armstrong, the founder and promoter of this
institution of practical learning, was given to us and to the nation,
and that through his influence and example, Tuskegee and other similar
institutions have grown into vigorous youth. Two of these seats of
industrial education, through a system of race conferences, have given
to us who are deprived of a popular press an opportunity to be heard
in our own behalf upon subjects, the public discussion of which,
through literary mediums, has been monopolized by members of the other
race. Our moral delinquencies have been discussed recently at the
North and in the South--at times in a sensible and at other times in a
nonsensical way; arguments have been made to the world by orators and
writers seemingly more interested and concerned in making the worse
appear the better reason than in philosophically looking into facts or
honestly seeking to discover truth. From much that has been said, it
would appear to one unacquainted with the American branch of the Negro
race that within thirty-five years it has become criminal, although
for nearly three centuries it has been a stranger to wrongdoing, law
abiding and not law breaking. Such radical change, if change there has
been, in individuals or classes of people, is rare, abnormal, and must
be accounted for in some other way than by the wholesale charge of
inherited savagery and innate moral obliquity. Crime from an
hereditary standpoint may not justly be chargeable to one race of men
to the exclusion of another, to the black race more than to the white,
to the yellow races more than to the white or black.

The first crime was in the first family. The sacred writings teach
that God gave, mid the thunderings of the heavens, the smoking of the
mountain, and the consternation of the people, the criminal code in
the ten commandments, which may be found in the traditions of heathen
peoples, somewhat modified, just as in the written laws of all
Christian nations. Had crime not existed prior to this heavenly edict,
there would have been little apparent reason for this ancient
pronouncement through a Hebrew medium. The conclusion seems