with you upon any subject of general interest with perfect ease and understanding.  Excuse me, if I refer to the fact that some two weeks ago I visited St. Louis for two reasons; first to see my son and daughter, and secondly and mainly to attend the seventy-second anniversary of the birth of perhaps the richest colored man in the State of Missouri.  I went to his house, and I was surprised as I entered his doors and looked about his sitting-room and parlors, furnished in the most approved modern style, in the richest manner; but I was more surprised when I saw one hundred guests come into the home of this venerable man, to celebrate the seventy-second anniversary of his birth, all beautifully attired; and when he told me, indirectly, how much money he had made, since the war, and what he was worth on the night of this celebration, I was more surprised than ever.  I am surprised at the matchless progress the colored people of this country have made since their emancipation.  I have traveled in the West Indies; I have seen the emancipated English, Spanish and French Negro; but I have seen no emancipated Negro anywhere who has made the progress at all comparable with the colored people of the United States of America.

I desire it to be distinctly understood, that I am not at all anxious about the mental and material development of the colored people of the United States.  They are naturally shrewd, calculating and agreeable, possessing in a peculiar degree the art of pleasing; and these qualities will give them creditable positions in the business interests of the country in a few years.  But they must have time to collect their wits, to sharpen their intelligence, to train their moral sense and the feeling of social responsibility, to fully comprehend all that the change from chattel slavery to absolute freedom implies.  Men cannot awaken from a Rip Van Winkle slumber of a hundred years and grasp at once the altered conditions which flash upon them.  The awakening is terrific, appalling, staggering.

When a man has been confined for long years in a dark dungeon he has not trouble in discerning objects about him which, when he first entered his dungeon, were indistinct or invisible to him.  So when he is brought suddenly to the strong light of the sun the effulgence overmasters him, and he is blind as a bat.  But slowly and painfully he becomes accustomed to the transition from absolute darkness to absolute light, and then nature wears to his vision her naturally gay and winsome appearance.  So with the slave.  His grasp of the conditions of freedom is slow and uncertain.  But give him time, lend him a helping hand, and he will completely master the situation.

In one of the most remarkable pamphlets of the time, written by C.K.  Marshall, D.D., of Vicksburg, Miss., entitled The Colored Race Weighed in the Balance, being a reply to a most malicious speech by J.L.  Tucker, D.D., of Jackson, Miss., I find many truths that the American people should know.  Both Dr. Marshall and Dr. Tucker are white ministers of the South, and both should be intimately acquainted with the characteristics, capacity and progress of the colored people.  But Dr. Tucker appears to be as ignorant of the colored race as if he had spent his days in the Sandwich Islands instead of the sunny land of the South.