that is what the Master told us to do. The danger of Count Tolstoi's
leadership in Russia is great, and it is solely this: that he does not
know that fact. The safety of your guidance, gentlemen, who conduct the
policy of this Association, is that you do. The education given by the
State and by the Federal Government has been and must necessarily be,
almost wholly secular. But the education given by this Association is
distinctly, not technically, religious. It is rooted and grounded in the
Bible. And if what I am saying appears to you trite, I am glad of it,
because it shows that on the substantial facts we are at one and need no
argument.

There are, however, two facts which sharply distinguish between the work
we have to do among our emancipated slaves and that set before Russia
among her emancipated serfs, and which make it more conspicuously
obvious than it can be in Russia that we need schools. We have, first of
all, to contend with the prejudice of color. We have been told how great
that is. I need spend no time in repeating this while the debates at
Worcester and in the Episcopal Convention at New York ring in our ears;
while Harvard seniors can not elect for class orator the ablest and
fittest man they have if he happens to be colored, without eliciting
from New York newspapers two-column editorials of amazement; and while
writers as wise, as informed, and as calm as George Cable, are unable to
write without showing their quivering apprehension of a race war. The
wickedness of this class feeling is conceded by all good men, and I need
not dwell upon it.

The cause of it has been largely overlooked, and therefore the remedies
so often advocated have proved futile. Until the cause is distinctly
recognized and acknowledged and remedied, the prejudice will remain. The
cause is this: All freeborn people in every age and clime have had a