accounts, teachers will not make reports, missionaries desire to
control, and they seldom are sufficiently respected, especially when
of younger age." Now, these are manifestly the vices and infirmities
of an immature and imperfectly cultured race. We must recollect that
centuries of civilization and Christian influences are behind
Europeans and Americans, while the native African, converted and
trained in his own land, has behind him only the few years of his own
life separating him from the densest degradation of heathenism; the
African born and converted in the West Indies has been a freedman
only since 1840; and the American Negro was perhaps himself a slave,
and his race had the shackles struck from their bodies only in 1863,
while the fetters of ignorance and vice still manacle the minds and
hearts of the mass. We ought not, therefore, so much to wonder at the
failure of the many, as to rejoice and take courage at the success of
the few, especially as there is a bright side to the dark picture, to
which I now take pleasure in turning your attention.

There _have been_ some very successful colored missionaries in
Africa, whom the Christian world has known and honored, and the
letters I have received joyfully refer to them, and mention others
not yet widely known, but whose work attests their wisdom, piety and
usefulness. Thus one Secretary refers to a missionary, born a slave
in America and educated here, as "the most scholarly man in the whole
mission." Another society testifies, and our personal knowledge of
the man referred to confirms the testimony, to the remarkable success
of one of its colored missionaries as "a business manager, a preacher
and a teacher, showing himself fully equal to any emergency, and
remarkable in his influence with the heads of the tribes, and his
success in winning souls." The testimony in regard to two others of
its missionaries is almost equally emphatic.