? They would stand on a better
vantage ground there than the Mohammedan, for he is a foreigner
transplanted on the soil. They would come back to the home of their
fathers, and would meet the natives as brothers--long separated, yet
as brothers; their color and personal characteristics would attest
the kinship, their Christian love would kindle towards the degraded
of their race, and their holy ambition would be fired by the great
work to which they were called--the uplifting of the millions of
long-neglected Africa. It would be reasonable to expect that they
would endure the African climate better than the white man. They are
a tropical race, and, in America, they love and cling to the sunny
South, seldom migrating to the North; they do not suffer from the
malaria that is so fatal to the whites in the South.

These views and impressions are confirmed by actual experience. With
a view of learning the results of that experience, I addressed
letters to the Secretaries of all the larger societies in Europe and
America doing missionary work on that continent, and, in due time,
received courteous replies from nearly all of them, giving opinions
and facts with more or less fulness of detail. My inquiries mainly
centered around two points: first, the ability of the colored
missionary as compared with the white, to endure the climate; and
secondly, his relative success as a missionary. The opinions given in
those letters, as might be expected, are various, and the facts
themselves, gathered from widely different sources, and relating to
very different climates and local circumstances, point to somewhat
different conclusions.

The specific statements of these letters may be thus summed up:

1. No society reports that the colored man is _less_ healthy than the
white; one or two societies discern as yet no special difference; but
the larger number say that he endures the climate much better than
the white man.

2. On the second point--the comparative success of colored
missionaries--the testimony bears very decidedly, _as a rule_, and
_as yet_ against them; while a few and very favorable exceptions
indicate that the fault is with the individual and not with the race,
and hold out the hope that time and better training will remove the
difficulties.

The more full account may be thus given: Some of the societies charge
a want of carefulness, perhaps a want of integrity against the
colored missionaries--that "colored treasurers