used in this way, while, at the same time, it is purchasing a new
piano for use in the Music Department. Few of our schools have more
loyal supporters among their graduates than Le Moyne. Coherence and
co-operation in racial interests are quite lacking and much needed
among the colored people, such co-operation as is best illustrated by
the Texas movement, described by the Hon. R. L. Smith, of Oakland,
Texas, in a recent issue of _The Independent_. Such work as has been
done at Oakland is, in many places, quietly being set on foot, with
varying degrees of success, by students and associations of students,
who had their training in schools of the American Missionary
Association. The immediate aim and end of all our work is the social
betterment of the people, and in the end its efficiency will be
measured according as it succeeds or fails in this respect.

The history of education in America, written largely during the past
thirty years, has few features of wider interest or deeper meaning
than the establishment and remarkable development of the "mission
schools" among the colored people of the South since their
emancipation. The spelling-book followed hard by the teachings of the
Bible, constituted the course of instruction at the beginning; this
simple beginning has developed into a great system of training and
instruction that exemplifies the latest and best methods of education
and of school administration known anywhere, from the kindergarten
through the common school branches, with manual or industrial
training, to the normal school and college. These ideas and methods
have very generally been extended and adopted into the common public
schools and the higher state institutions, mostly taught and managed
by graduates of the mission schools.

[Illustration: CHILDREN'S CHILDREN, LE MOYNE INSTITUTE.]

All this growth of educational institutions and facilities would have
been impossible except that along with it and acting as the
underlying cause of and reason for it, there has gone a corresponding
development of individuals of the race and of the race collectively,
for whose uplifting it has most providentially been brought into
existence.

The illustration entitled "Children's Children," accompanying this
article, shows a class of children whose _grandparents_, direct from
slavery, began with awkward, faltering steps to tread the "hidden
paths of knowledge," and whose parents in their turn were graduated
from th