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REPORT ON SECRETARY BEARD’S PAPER.

BY REV.  H.M.  TENNEY, D.D., CHAIRMAN

The committee to which was referred the paper of Secretary Beard respectfully report that the “Missionary View of the Southern Situation” therein presented impresses us profoundly with the fact that the sincerest piety is the most exalted patriotism.  It commends itself to us as worthy of the most serious attention of the thoughtful of both races in the North and in the South.  The gravity of the Southern problem, as set before us, is little less than appalling.  The colored race now looks back over a quarter of a century of freedom and recognized rights.  The traditions and customs and conservative ties of slavery are broken with its chains.  The ideas, aspirations and manly instincts of liberty have taken hold upon the colored people and are becoming controlling.  The intellectual progress of the many, the political and national prominence of the few, the acquisition of wealth, and the marvelously disproportionate increase in their numbers, serve to awaken the colored race to self-consciousness and a sense of power.  It is beginning to demand its rights and to be impatient of their resistance and suppression.  The Samson of the past, bound, shorn and blinded, stands to-day with fetters broken, with locks grown long, and with eyes yet dim, but with the dimness of returning vision, as one who sees men as trees walking.  And whether he shall be carried on to complete emancipation, intellectual and spiritual, a true manhood, or goaded to madness, and driven to bow himself against the pillars of our national and social temple, and pull it down to the common ruin of us all, is the question of the hour.  A race so situated, were there no other factors in the problem, would be a peril to any people, and would call for the most helpful effort and self-sacrificing zeal and Christ-like patience.

But the white man in the Southern situation is as serious a factor in the problem as the black man.  In a different way, the incubus of slavery has rested as heavily upon him as upon his black brother.  The illiteracy is not all on one side.  If we put ourselves in the place of our Southern white brothers, and remember what human nature is, apart from the grace of God, we may not greatly wonder, in view of the heritage of the past and the real difficulties and perils of the present, that there is an intensity of race prejudice, and a bitterness of caste spirit, and an increasing hostility to the rising colored population which registers itself in outbreaks of violence and bloodshed, in the defiance of law, and in crimes against the ballot-box.  We may not be greatly surprised that there should be intelligent men who regard the education of the colored man as a calamity, and deny his rights, and call for his disfranchisement.  The white man of the South needs emancipation and Christian elevation