We want to help them:  we ought to help them.  For what were we nurtured and shielded in Christian homes; why taught self-restraint, self-reliance, the law of God as applied to our duty to ourselves and our neighbors?  Why have our hands been trained to skillful work, our minds opened to knowledge, if not to make these our talents ten more by their exercise in behalf of such needy ones?  But how shall we convey to them the blessings of intelligent, Christian home life?  I am sure every womanly heart gives the same response:  through the children.

That is our way—­the foundation of the broad work of this Association.  We cannot expect the mothers to teach their children what they do not know themselves, have never seen and cannot understand.  So we bring the youth out of these homes, cut off as far as possible from their low surroundings, into our missionary schools, where they are lifted into a purer atmosphere and are brought into daily contact with refined Christian womanhood.  Here mind and heart and hand are trained.  Not only do they learn habits of fore-thought and industry, but by the blessing of the Holy Spirit very many of them learn the saving power there is in Jesus Christ.  Ten thousand youth we have thus reached within the last year.  Is it not a grand work, worthy your heartiest support?  There is encouragement in all our fields, but especially now in what is accomplished for the girls of the colored race.  Their perils are peculiar.  Your hearts would ache could you know all the dangers that encompass them.  They are beset on every hand.  Not a girl in our schools is safe.  They, of all others, are the ones that are tried, tempted, allured.  Do they go out to teach, they are watched, written to, harassed, and only as strong in God’s strength and deliverance can they escape.  When you think of the snares set for these girls, and that no father or brother may even yet dare defend them, and when you know that there are those—­yes, very many—­who, guided by Christian teachers stand firm in the purity of their womanhood, clinging to the Everlasting Arm, how plain it is that God has a plan, a purpose for this race, when we shall have fulfilled our duty to them, and when their fiery furnace of trial shall have done its work!

And these people are not in Asia, or Africa, or the Islands of the Sea.  They are within our own domain—­ten millions of them—­a constant reminder of our duty, a threat of danger if duty is neglected.  You may say, what are ten thousand youth among ten millions?  They are the leaven, which, if a woman take and properly direct shall leaven the whole mass.  The American Missionary Association has these youth, and through these, access to larger numbers.  It has been no easy matter to win the alienated Indian until he would give up his boys and girls to our care; nor to break through the ignorant pride and reserve of the mountaineers; or even to wisely direct the impulsive, selfishly ambitious, undisciplined colored people.  But it has been done.  Our school homes are there, upon the sure foundation of gospel, no caste principles, and we need the help of every Christian woman in the land to sustain what has been established at such painstaking and cost, and to meet the demand for the new phases of help that can now be given.