and detraction by another set.  The one has painted him as a sort of angel, and the other as a sort of devil; when, in fact, he is neither one nor the other; when, simply, he is a man, a member of the common family, possessing no more virtue nor vice than his brother, the brother who has managed to so impose upon himself that he is pretty thoroughly convinced that nature expended all its most choice materials in the construction of his class.  But this is simply the work of the devil, who delights in throwing cayenne pepper into the eyes of good men.

The aspects of the work which has been done in the South for the colored people by “missionaries,” so to term them, by the assistance of large sums of money donated by philanthropic men and women, are very many-sided indeed.  I would in no wise underrate the magnitude of the work performed, nor attribute to those who have been the agents in disbursing these unparalleled benefactions motives other than of the purest and loftiest, in a majority of cases; but I think the time has arrived when we may disrobe the matter of the romance which writers have industriously woven about it.  In the early stages of the work a few men and women of large fortunes, who had been “born with a silver spoon in their mouths,” may have gone South to labor for humanity and the Master, may have left comfortable firesides and congenial companionships to make their homes among strangers who shut them out from their affections and sympathies because they had come to labor for the poor and the despised.  Examples of this lofty devotion to a good cause there undoubtedly were in the days long ago; but the bulk of the work was performed by persons, male and female, to whom employment, an opportunity to make an honest living in an honest way, was a godsend.  That they possessed much bravery to undertake a work which shut them out from the sympathy and social recognition of those who may be called their equals, is not denied; but that they were the pampered children of fortune, laboring simply for God and humanity, which zealous persons have painted them to be in newspapers and magazines, religious and other, is simply making a mountain out of a mole-hill.  They were neither millionaires nor paupers, but they were educated men and women, like thousands throughout the North and West, who went into the field to labor because it was rich unto the harvest and the laborers were few.  To say that salaries offered were not accepted always with promptness would be to get on the wrong side of a correct statement of fact.  There are hundreds and thousands of educated men and women in the North and West to-day “waiting for something to turn up,” and who would not hesitate a moment to embrace an opportunity, honorable and lucrative, which should present itself.  There was little romance in the undertaking; there was far less in the work to be performed.  I simply desire to protest against the correctness of the distorted pictures drawn ostensibly