eelings, of your deep poverty at the close of the war, conditions were
such that you could not do this work yourselves, you might have give a
Christian's welcome to the women who came a thousand miles to do the
work, that, in all gratitude and obligation belonged to you,--but
instead, these women were often persecuted, always they have been
ruthlessly ostracised, even until this day; often they were lonely,
often longed for a word of sympathy, often craved association with their
own race, but for thirty years they have been treated by the Christian
white women of the South,--simply because they were doing your
work,--the work committed to you by your Saviour, when he said,
"Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you
did it unto me,"--with a contempt that would serve to justify a
suspicion that instead of being the most cultured women, the purest,
bravest missionaries in America, they were outcasts and lepers.

But at last a change has come. And so you have "decided to take up the
work of moral and industrial training of the Negroes," as you "have been
doing this work among the whites with splendid results." This is one of
the most hopeful stars that have shot through the darkness of the
Southern sky. What untold blessings might not the educated Christian
women of the South prove to the Negro groping blindly in the darkness of
the swamps and bogs of prejudice for a highway out of servitude,
oppression, ignorance, and immorality!

* * * * *

The leading women of Georgia should not ask Northern charity to do what
they certainly must have the means for making a beginning of themselves.
If your heart is really in this work--and we do not question it--the
very best way for you to atone for your negligence in the past is to
make a start yourselves. Surely if the conditions are as serious as you
represent them to be, your husbands, who are men of large means, who are
able to run great expositions and big peace celebrations, will be
willing to provide you with the means to protect your virtue and that of
your daughters by the moral training you propose to give in the
kindergartens.

There is much you might do without the contribution of a dollar from any
pocket, Northern or Southern. On every plantation there are scores, if
not hundreds, of little colored children who could be gathered about
you on a Sabbath afternoon and given many helpful inspiring lessons in
morals and good conduct.

* * * * *