The Government at Washington can do something toward protecting these people in their political rights; but there is very little, after all, that can be done for any people which does not know how to assert and maintain its own rights.  Liberty can never be a gratuity, it must always be an achievement.  Peoples, as well as individuals, must work out their own salvation.  The Negro at the South is cheated out of his political rights, simply because he does not know how to claim them; the Indian on the plains is defrauded of his property, because he does not know how to protect himself.  No matter how favorable the laws may be to these hapless people, they will be oppressed and impoverished and kept in a condition of semi-slavery, unless they know how to use the laws in their own advantage.  Education, therefore, is the only effectual remedy for their wrongs.  To awaken their minds, to arouse the energies of hope, to show them that they are made in God’s image and that they have a right to all the liberties of the laws of God, is the only way to complete and secure their emancipation from bondage and from barbarism.

This is the work to which the American Missionary Association calls us all.  It is our just pride as Congregationalists that through this Association more has been done for the true enfranchisement of the freedmen than through any other agency, and it is our duty to see that this great work, in which we have borne so large and honorable a part, halt not nor slacken in its energy because of our failure to keep its treasury replenished and its faithful laborers re-enforced and supported by our gifts and our prayers.

* * * * *

FACTS AND FIGURES.

The sum total of all the contributions of all the benevolent agencies for the evangelization and education of the Negro in the South, is seventeen cents per year for each person.

This seventeen cents includes whatever is done in missionary colleges and in all educational missions, as well as in the direct church work.

In twenty-one years from 1841 to 1861 there were twenty-one crops of cotton raised by slave labor, which aggregated 58,441,906 bales. {149}

In the twenty-one years from 1865 to 1885 there were twenty-one crops of cotton which aggregated 93,389,031 bales.

That is, by free labor there was an excess over the productions of slave labor of 34,947,125 bales, or nearly 35,000,000 bales.  The value of 35,000,000 bales of cotton produced by free labor in excess of the product of slave labor cannot have been less than $2,000,000,000, or about the full valuation of all the slaves who were made free by the war, had they been sold at the ruling prices.  The gain is due not only to the emancipation of the blacks, but to the emancipation of the whites from enforced idleness.

The cotton factories of the world annually require about 12,000,000 bales of cotton, American weight.  Good land in Texas produces one bale to the acre.  The world’s supply of cotton could be grown on less than 19,000 square miles, or upon an area equal to only seven per cent. of the area of Texas.