how to assert and
maintain its own rights. Liberty can never be a gratuity, it must
always be an achievement. Peoples, as well as individuals, must work
out their own salvation. The Negro at the South is cheated out of his
political rights, simply because he does not know how to claim them;
the Indian on the plains is defrauded of his property, because he does
not know how to protect himself. No matter how favorable the laws may
be to these hapless people, they will be oppressed and impoverished
and kept in a condition of semi-slavery, unless they know how to use
the laws in their own advantage. Education, therefore, is the only
effectual remedy for their wrongs. To awaken their minds, to arouse
the energies of hope, to show them that they are made in God's image
and that they have a right to all the liberties of the laws of God, is
the only way to complete and secure their emancipation from bondage
and from barbarism.

This is the work to which the American Missionary Association calls us
all. It is our just pride as Congregationalists that through this
Association more has been done for the true enfranchisement of the
freedmen than through any other agency, and it is our duty to see that
this great work, in which we have borne so large and honorable a part,
halt not nor slacken in its energy because of our failure to keep its
treasury replenished and its faithful laborers re-enforced and
supported by our gifts and our prayers.

* * * * *

FACTS AND FIGURES.

The sum total of all the contributions of all the benevolent agencies
for the evangelization and education of the Negro in the South, is
seventeen cents per year for each person.

This seventeen cents includes whatever is done in missionary colleges
and in all educational missions, as well as in the direct church work.

In twenty-one years from 1841 to 1861 there were twenty-one crops of
cotton raised by slave labor, which aggregated 58,441,906 bales.
{149}

In the twenty-one years from 1865 to 1885 there were twenty-one crops
of cotton which aggregated 93,389,031 bales.

That is, by free labor there was an excess over the productions of
slave labor of 34,947,125 bales, or nearly 35,000,000 bales. The value
of 35,000,000 bales of cotton produced by free labor in excess of the
product of slave labor cannot have been less than $2,000,000,000, or
about the full valuation of all the slaves who were made free by the
war, had they bee