There is a great work for you to do, as trifling as some of you may think of it.  You have to prove to the Americans and the world, that we are MEN, and not brutes as we have been represented, and by millions treated.  Remember, to let the aim of your labours among your brethren, and particularly the youths, be the dissemination of education and religion.  It is lamentable, that many of our children go to school, from four until they are eight or ten, and sometimes fifteen years of age, and leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket—­and not a few of them are really so ignorant, that they are unable to answer a person correctly, general questions in geography, and to hear them read would only be to disgust a man who has a taste for reading; which, to do well, as trifling as it may appear to some, (to the ignorant in particular) is a great part of learning.  Some few of them, may make out to scribble tolerably well, over a half sheet of paper, which I believe has hitherto been a powerful obstacle in our way, to keep us from acquiring knowledge.  An ignorant father, who knows no more than what nature has taught him, together with what little he acquires by the senses of hearing and seeing, finding his son able to write a neat hand, sets it down for granted that he has as good learning as any body; the young, ignorant gump, hearing his father or mother, who perhaps may be ten times more ignorant, in point of literature, than himself, extolling his learning, struts about in the full assurance, that his attainments in literature are sufficient to take him through the world, when, in fact, he has scarcely any learning at all!!!!

I promiscuously fell in a conversation once, with an elderly colored man on the topics of education, and of the great prevalency of ignorance among us:  Said he, “I know that our people are very ignorant but my son has a good education:  he can write as well as any white man, and I assure you that no one can fool him,” etc.  Said I, what else can your son do, besides writing a good hand?  Can he post a set of books in a mercantile manner?  Can he write a neat piece of composition in prose or in verse?  To these interrogations he answered in the negative.  Said I, Did your son learn, while he was at school, the width and depth of English Grammar? to which he also replied in the negative, telling me his son did not learn those things.  Your son, said I, then, has hardly any learning at all—­he is almost as ignorant, and more so, than many of those who never went to school one day in their lives.  My friend got a little put out, and so walking off said that his son could write as well as any white man.—­Most of the coloured people, when they speak of the education of one among us who can write a neat hand, and who perhaps knows nothing but to scribble and puff pretty fair on a small scrap of paper, immaterial whether his words are grammatical,