The specific statements of these letters may be thus summed up: 

1.  No society reports that the colored man is less healthy than the white; one or two societies discern as yet no special difference; but the larger number say that he endures the climate much better than the white man.

2.  On the second point—­the comparative success of colored missionaries—­the testimony bears very decidedly, as a rule, and as yet against them; while a few and very favorable exceptions indicate that the fault is with the individual and not with the race, and hold out the hope that time and better training will remove the difficulties.

The more full account may be thus given:  Some of the societies charge a want of carefulness, perhaps a want of integrity against the colored missionaries—­that “colored treasurers will not render accounts, teachers will not make reports, missionaries desire to control, and they seldom are sufficiently respected, especially when of younger age.”  Now, these are manifestly the vices and infirmities of an immature and imperfectly cultured race.  We must recollect that centuries of civilization and Christian influences are behind Europeans and Americans, while the native African, converted and trained in his own land, has behind him only the few years of his own life separating him from the densest degradation of heathenism; the African born and converted in the West Indies has been a freedman only since 1840; and the American Negro was perhaps himself a slave, and his race had the shackles struck from their bodies only in 1863, while the fetters of ignorance and vice still manacle the minds and hearts of the mass.  We ought not, therefore, so much to wonder at the failure of the many, as to rejoice and take courage at the success of the few, especially as there is a bright side to the dark picture, to which I now take pleasure in turning your attention.

There have been some very successful colored missionaries in Africa, whom the Christian world has known and honored, and the letters I have received joyfully refer to them, and mention others not yet widely known, but whose work attests their wisdom, piety and usefulness.  Thus one Secretary refers to a missionary, born a slave in America and educated here, as “the most scholarly man in the whole mission.”  Another society testifies, and our personal knowledge of the man referred to confirms the testimony, to the remarkable success of one of its colored missionaries as “a business manager, a preacher and a teacher, showing himself fully equal to any emergency, and remarkable in his influence with the heads of the tribes, and his success in winning souls.”  The testimony in regard to two others of its missionaries is almost equally emphatic.