growth and influence of the Church among the white people of the State.

The fact is, say what we will about it—it would carry me too far afield to explain it to-night—that the negro cannot work together on equality with the white man; he either assumes an apparent insolence and stubbornness, which the whites will not allow; or he puts on a civility and submission, which strips him of his manhood. So, we are placed in this condition: when we keep the negro close to us on formal equality, he has no real opportunity to grow and develop in the true characteristics of manhood; when we put him off in an inferior diocesan Convocation, he feels that he is not treated as a man; he is forced steadily to realize his inferiority to the white man, that inferiority declared

and impressed upon him by the Church of God. This, it seems to me, is the chief reason why we are not now growing as we ought to among the leading influential negroes of the South; and the reason why there is much restlessness and want of satisfaction among the negroes who are already in the Church.

What ought we to do to meet these conditions? Let us turn aside for a moment to consider the general conditions of the negroes and their relation to the white people. We have to-day about the same relative proportion of blacks to whites in the whole country as we had in 1860—about 12 per cent.—; and we have nearly the same in the South, about 40 per cent. What is to become of the negro for the next fifty years? No man would dare suggest an answer looking farther ahead than that: God only knows. Some say he will amalgamate with the whites. Many thought so immediately after the war who do not think or say so now. No; after forty years the separation between the races is clearer, wider and more distinct than ever before. The thoughtful black men do not desire amalgamation; and the white men will not have it. Some say the negro will be colonized. I think that there is less reason in this answer even than in the former. The negroes do not wish to go; and we cannot force them. Think of the difficulty of deporting forcibly nine million people! No; as Dr. Booker T. Washington

says, "This problem is not to be solved by deportation or by amalgamation." The negroes are here to stay with us, and the bulk of them will stay in the South.

For years there has been a steady movement of the negroes from the country to the towns and cities of the South, and from the Southern cities to the Northern. I think they are coming and will continue to come North in sufficient numbers for our brethren of the North to learn to know them, to sympathize with us in our problem and to have something of a problem themselves, and to feel that we must all work together towards its true and final solution. The negroes are dividing into two distinct classes more decidedly, it seems to me, than any other nationality in our country; and I hope they will continue to keep and increase this distinction. A minority are improving, are taking advantage of education, are advancing in morality and industry, are acquiring property and becoming worthy citizens. These few are setting a standard, and are giving us hope of what the negro can and may become. The majority are not improving, but rather retrogressing. They are looking on liberty as license; they are thinking that a little education will give them the privilege of living without manual labor; they are making higher wages the way to less work rather than the way to a higher standard of

life; they are shiftless, immoral, and criminal. Now, as I study this race so dividing in the great laboratory of Nature, under the law of God which works on so justly, ofttimes apparently so cruelly, always for the general good of man, I look forward with the hope that this smaller, higher class will increase, and that