drunkenness has
been a widespread curse among them, and to-day hangs like a mill-stone
to the neck of many a Negro to prevent his rising. The sin of
licentiousness prevails also to an alarming degree in many quarters. And
wherever intemperance and social immorality abound, you find also the
kindred vices of dishonesty, lying and laziness. No people can possibly
have a great future in whose life these iniquities burn like a consuming
fire. The manhood will be utterly burnt out of them before it can bear
fruit in a large success. We need to send apostles of reform among them
to turn them from their vices. We need to erect barriers of defense to
protect them from temptation. Above all, we need to teach them a
religion indissolubly joined with morality, a religion that means
character and virtue, whose daily experience will mean the constant
increase of moral power. The Negroes, like the Athenians of Paul's day,
are very religious. They revel in camp meetings and fairly wallow in
revivals. But too often their piety is the mere gush of emotion, and in
hideous conjunction with gross evils. They need an intelligent piety and
an educated ministry. As Dr. Powell said, they ought to have 7,000
educated ministers, when now in our sense of the word educated, they
have hardly 500. The church work of this Association is a powerful aid
to their moral upliftment.

Our next duty is to furnish the Negro plentifully with opportunities for
education. An ignorant race can have no future, save one of degradation
for themselves, and of increasing danger for the nation of which it is a
part. The ignorant Negro must be abolished by the school-house. Training
for the mind, training for the hand, the development and drill of all
the powers of life are necessary to make the Negro no more a peril, but
a factor of immense value in securing the future prosperity of this
country. We must do far more in this direction than has ever yet been
done. The South is still poor and cannot furnish adequately the means
for doing this work as it should be done. The benevolence of the North
must furnish still larger sums for education, that the colored race may
be made safe for us and for themselves.

And, last but not least, we must secure to the Negro the full enjoyment
of all his rights and privileges in church and State. He cannot attain
the measure of success and usefulness toward which Providence points, if
he is to be kept in a state of peonage. A black ma