by deprecating the use of our beautiful liturgy which they cannot understand; yet we ought to have done, we ought to be doing far more with the negroes than we have done or are doing. We are barely touching the edge of the negro people; just think of it: one in one thousand, while we have among

the whites one in about 121 of the population. In Virginia, where there is one in 50 of the white population who are members of the Episcopal Church, there is only one in 381 of the negroes; in North Carolina one in 115 whites and one in 480 blacks. In South Carolina, where in 1860 the whites and blacks were about equal, the whites have gone forward to seven thousand, and the negroes have fallen back to one thousand. Yet that is not the most unsatisfactory part of the matter. We are not strongly attracting to the Church the element we ought to have; the exceptional negroes, the educated and enterprising, the leaders of their race. Why? Let the facts answer. I have already said that the Church strove to continue after the war the same method of dealing with the negroes as before. She tried to keep the races together; but she has found it impractical, that impracticability growing more and more clear as the years have run on. The races have been steadily drifting apart in all social or semi-social life; the better class of each race is coming less and less into contact with each other; and race prejudice is increasing and deepening in the great masses of both the white and the black people. Soon after the war, wherever the negroes were in great numbers, we found it necessary to build separate churches for them. We admitted their clergymen and laymen to the Councils of the diocese on equal terms

with the whites; but that custom has been steadily changing. Some twenty years ago South Carolina and Virginia, dreading too great an increase of negro clergy and laity, led the way to new conditions. South Carolina excluded them entirely from the Diocesan Council, without any further provision for them. Virginia did not disturb those already having seats in the Council, but simply refused to let any more come in on the same terms. She erected a separate Convocation for the negroes, and now allows a certain number to have seats as representatives from the Convocation to the Council. Two years ago Arkansas put the negroes aside into a separate Convocation with no representation in the Council of the Diocese. Georgia last year formed a separate Convocation; but has allowed them by the act of separation to come into the Council to vote for the Standing Committee, the deputies to the General Convention and for the Bishop, whenever one is to be elected: giving them, you see, legal representation in important affairs. The Convention of the Diocese of North Carolina is now discussing the matter of separation, and is only delaying its own action, while waiting to see what shall be done next fall by the General Convention. In our own Diocese of East Carolina, the negroes are formally and legally on the same basis as the whites; but is that satisfactory? Not at all. The negro

laity rarely go to the Council. The negro clergy go; but they take a back seat; they have nothing to do or say; they are not expected to show their interest or their will, except by voting. Instead of its doing them good to come to the Council, it really does them harm. They are depressed, they feel the difference between themselves and the white men; they have little or no opportunity to take responsibility and to develop Christian manhood. Perceiving this state of things, the clear headed leader of the forces for separation in the Diocese of North Carolina tells me that he is urging this separation for the real good of the negro as well as for the