what deeps some will descend! Why should colored people add to the
criminality of being born black, the fearful temptation of pay in
advance to one who could teach them while he had pupils who had the
merit of having been born white?

This was really transpiring in the city of Atlanta several days in the
month of February in the year 1888, and was in successive issues of
the _Constitution_, which shows among other things that there is
latitude, if not longitude, at a Brooklyn New England dinner.
Meanwhile we think we hear Uncle Rastus quoting the prophecy, "The
morning cometh and also the night," but he can't help laughing because
it is "awful funny."

* * * * *

THE EDUCATIONAL WORK IN THE SOUTH.

BY REV. W.F. SLOCUM.

We may remember at the outset that in this matter of the education of
the Negro we are treating a question which must be considered, to a
certain extent, ethnically. We are dealing with a people with race
peculiarities: but it seems to me that it is very useless to ask
whether we are training an inferior stock. There was a time when the
Anglo-Saxon stock was far inferior {96} to its present condition. We
ourselves are not enough removed from heathenism and barbarism to
become very pharisaical.

Here is a race with its idiosyncrasies, and its peculiar latent
possibilities, which we cannot know until Christian education has
unfolded them through many years. We ought not to wonder that in many
respects this people is yet in its moral and intellectual infancy; but
who dares say that it has not a future before it, with its statesmen,
its poets, its painters, its men of letters; that it is not to have
its own peculiar literature, its art, and even its own characteristic
religious expression, just as marked and important as those produced
by any other race? Certainly we have as much reason for believing it
as that the Teutonic race of the second century should produce its
Goethe and its Schiller, its Kant and its Hegel, its Luther and its
Melanchthon; or that the Frank of the fifth century should develop its
Victor Hugo, its Lamartine, its Madam de Stael; or that out of the
barbarism, the cannibalism, the paganism of Norseman, Briton and
Saxon, there should come Shakespeare, Spencer, Macaulay, Browning and
Gladstone. And we may not have to wait as long; for in spite of
slavery's binding chain thrice drawn round his soul, the American
Negro has been absorbing during the past from a