Twenty-five years, indeed, is a short time for a study of this sort.  It is hardly to be counted in the history of a race.  A century is but a unit in the problem of a people’s history.  We have no right to form our judgments yet, as to the place the Negro people may take.  What three or four centuries may do for the race is to be settled too remotely for us to testify.

A distinguished educator lately said that he had been disappointed in the intellectual ability and resources of the Negro.  The race had not shown itself to be hopeful.  I reply, if in twenty-five years we have the few remarkable instances of advancement and attainment which appear, together with a very large general uplift in education and character, may not these facts be the prophecies and pledges of a future that shall not be inferior.

Even now the difference between the uneducated and the educated black man is very striking.  The crudeness and the unrefinement in feature are not necessary accompaniments of color.  Thick lips do not inherently belong with a dark skin.  Coarseness of feature belongs to white people, long degraded, as well, and is to be eliminated in them also by the evolution which takes place in schools and churches.

Here is a race from original heathenism which has come through two hundred years of the darkness of slavery, set free in exceedingly unhelpful conditions, and shut in for the most part to association with illiteracy, bad manners, bad morals and bad habits.  Only exceptionally can colored people come near enough to those who are high and good to get much good by seeing what goodness is and how it lives.

Yet, notwithstanding this, history reveals nothing more wonderful than what we see in those who have come from homes which are not homes and from previous degrading influences, as they pass through a term of years in our schools.

When the generations to come from these shall have had for a century the impartial blessings of an intelligent and pure Christianity, the question as to the Negro’s place among the races will be nearer solution.

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FACTS ABOUT BALLARD SCHOOL

    We present to our readers four pictures giving different views of
    the Ballard Normal School at Macon, Ga., and add here a
    description copied from the Ballard Record:

Ballard Normal School has this year entered upon the fruition of many earnest hopes and desires, in the opening of the boarding department, in connection with the day school.  We have now a large family of boarding pupils living in the beautiful new dormitory, erected last summer through the interest of Mr. Ballard, who gave us our commodious school building one year ago.  As memory goes back to the “early days,” from 1865 to 1868, when this school was in its infancy, and was taught in various barns, dwelling houses and