As I think of the future of my country, my anxiety is not for the black race.

The two nations which seem destined to exert in the near future the most intense and wide influence are Russia and the United States.  Before each of them God has set essentially the same task and appears to have conditioned largely their prosperity upon the way in which they do it.  That task is to develop into full-orbed free men a vast number of citizens who have been dwarfed and twisted by slavery.  How to do this most thoroughly and speedily is the superlatively important question for each nation to decide.  In Russia, there is no more acute observer than Count Tolstoi:  and Count Tolstoi has said to his countrymen, “What we in Russia need supremely is three things; they are schools and schools and schools.”  The American Missionary Association, in view of all that has been said here these two days, seems to me to be repeating, with the emphasis of an adequate experience, those same words; and I think Mr. Hand has shown a judgment equal to his generosity in so wording the conditions of his gift that it repeats the same thing.  The Association, whether intentionally or unintentionally, is telling us that what we need in the South supremely is “schools and schools and schools.”

By schools I certainly do not mean institutions which train only the mind or the body, or both.  I am perfectly familiar with the picture which Mr. Maturin Ballou has drawn of the Alaska Indian using the knowledge gained in missionary schools to raise a check.  I know that education which does not rightly train the will may be giving tools to a burglar or weapons to a mad man.  The anarchism in Chicago, but for the education it controls, would have been like Bunyan’s giants—­able only to gnaw its nails in malice and have fits in sunshiny weather.  But the American Missionary Association understands this thoroughly.  In that copy of the year’s review which Dr. Strieby sent me, the report of the school work was marked with a red pencil, that of the church work with a blue one; but the two marks overlapped, the red and the blue, so completely that all attempts to separate them were hopeless.  Dr. Strieby himself could not distinguish between the church work and the school work of the Association.  No man can.  They are indistinguishable because they have been inseparable.  This is as it should be.  This is essential to their real success.  This is New Testament preaching—­discipling; and that is what the Master told us to do.  The danger of Count Tolstoi’s leadership in Russia is great, and it is solely this:  that he does not know that fact.  The safety of your guidance, gentlemen, who conduct the policy of this Association, is that you do.  The education given by the State and by the Federal Government has been and must necessarily be, almost wholly secular.  But the education given by this Association is distinctly, not technically, religious.  It is rooted and grounded in the Bible.  And if what I am saying appears to you trite, I am glad of it, because it shows that on the substantial facts we are at one and need no argument.