allville,
Andersonville, Macon, Savannah, Charleston, Knoxville, Jonesboro, and
others, where schools and churches, hand in hand, are saving the needy
peoples. I can only say that as I visited these and other places I was
constantly cheered both by the fidelity of the workers and by the
efficiency of their work. The story of these workers together with God
will never be fully told.

In many places I found deepest poverty. The greatest luxury of the poor
people is the "schooling" of their children. Parents will go hungry for
this. Many of the children trudged along barefooted for miles when ice was
on the pools by the roadside. I found, as I have before, churches and
schools leavening their communities with more intelligent manhood and
womanhood, with better homes, with wiser industries and economies, with
stronger and truer characters. Many times I said: "If the good people who
have ordained and sustained this work until now could only see it and know
it as it actually is, our distressing debt would vanish within half a
year. Our Jubilee would come, and we should 'arise and shine and give God
the glory.'"

A Home Mission Work Little Understood.

Secretary Frank P. Woodbury.

Those who have visited only the cities and towns of the South have not
seen the black South. In the six Southern states containing what has been
called the Black Belt there are four millions of negro people. Less than
half a million of these live in the cities, towns, and villages, while
more than three millions and a half of them dwell on the plantations of
the country. Mr. Bryce in his work on America has called attention to the
enormous difference between the colored churches of the cities and those
of the poor negro districts, in some of which not merely have the old
superstitions been retained but there has been a marked relapse into the
Obeah rites and serpent worship of African heathenism. The rank
superstitions, the beliefs in necromancy and witchcraft, the wild orgies
of excitement, the utter divorce between the moral virtues and what is
called religion, which obtain among the millions of the plantation negroes
of the South, are but little understood. By one who knows it, the Black
Belt has been called the great Dismal Swamp, the vast black malarial
slough of the American republic.

Gladstone has frequently emphasized an ancient saying, "The corruption of
the best thing is the very worst thing." This is emphatically true of muc