foremost. It is a Zion that will bear and courts inspection, not only such as may be made by a leisurely "walk round about it," but exact and minute scrutiny in which "judgment is laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet." In some near future, when the history of the continent for the last half of this century comes to be written, it will be seen that the American Missionary Association was one of the most influential factors in the solution of great national problems, in removing sectional differences, in obliterating race distinctions, in harmonizing conflicting policies, and, better and more marvelous than all else, in building up out of African and Indian, and Mongolian and Caucasian a kingdom of God in whose unity all diversities blend and all separating lines are effaced, and righteousness is the sole and sufficient foundation, and sanctified manhood and womanhood the walls of strength and splendor.

Do you realize, good friends, the contrast between America at the date of the founding of this society and the America of this year of grace? The interval of time is short, but we have been making history at a prodigious rate, a rate so rapid that in the rush of it the advance of to-day dims the recollection of the position of yesterday. Forty years ago this nominally free government was a tyranny. It posed before the world in the white fleece of liberty, but the covering was too scant to hide the ravening wolf underneath. The world held no such infernal riot of iniquity as American slavery. High treason against God and man, it bred unnumbered crimes. Generations were born in the darkness of captivity, moaned and struggled awhile for light, and died. In its greed for gain the nation coined the bodies and souls of men into money. Many a millionaire built his mansion on outrage and wrong. The timbers of his house were the bones of innocent victims. For every adorning some brother man had groaned and smarted under the lash. And yet how few dared or cared to protest against this hell upon earth. The Government said, "Hands off!" The churches were afraid to meddle with the matter or talked piously about "the patriarchal institution." Great publishing societies emasculated the tracts which they issued for the purpose of saving the souls of men, and tore out of them all reference to the iniquity which was destroying both soul and body. Foremost organizations that clamored for laborers and money to preach the glad tidings of deliverance to the swarthy dwellers on the banks of the Ganges, could not see as far as the banks of the Mississippi. Only one Christian organization in the broad land—this Association, dared to say, Slavery is an accursed thing. Riddance from it was only a dim hope, the remotest of possibilities. And all that less than forty years ago. To-day no foot of a slave presses the soil of the continent; to-day ancient irresponsible ownership of the souls and bodies of men is a nightmare of the past, and the haughtiness of unquestioned authority is changing to conciliation and growing respect for human rights; to-day an emancipated race has not only cast off the fetters from its limbs but is seeking and finding the larger liberty of completed manhood and womanhood. Wonderful and blessed change; you search history in vain to find its parallel.

In our review of these forty years it is natural that we should inquire as to what forces have been efficient in producing such large results, and quite as natural also that we should credit overweight to influences that have been dramatic and measurable, and overlook or depreciate subtler agencies that make little stir, and work below the surface. We say in a large way, that civil war was the procuring cause of the change that has been wrought, but as the war was not carried on for that purpose, it is more exact to say that incidentally and unintentionally it made the change possible. We assert more specifically that the Emancipation Proclamation was the one supreme factor in inaugurating the new order of things, and no smallest leaf should be plucked from the wreath of honor which crowns the heroic Lincoln. The scratch of the President's pen in that quiet room, writing the new and greater Magna Charta, will be heard for ever. History, like a vast whispering gallery, will reduplicate the sound and pass it on to the ages to come. It was heard at once the breadth of the continent and across the sea. It outran the tramp of armies, and distanced the roar of cannon. It went down through the valleys of Virginia, through the pine barrens and rice swamps of the Carolinas. It rang along the everglades of Florida; it reached to the cane brakes and cotton fields of Louisiana; the Alleghanies echoed it to the Sierras; the Father of Waters caught up the sound, and rolled it like sweetest music to theGulf, and in the hearing of it, millions woke to freedom. And yet the calm judicial estimate must take into account that the Proclamation was primarily, if not solely, a war expedient, not righteousness for righteousness' sake; and must take into account also that it effected nothing beyond a change in legal relations, voiding of power certain State statutes that legitimatized slavery. The mere shift of status under the law from bondage to freedom, provided the opportunity, but it did not and could not supply the force adequate to effect those industrial and intellectual and moral transformations which are the most conspicuous evidences of progress. The stalwart element which had been slowly developed in public sentiment had far more efficiency than the official edict, but the influence of public sentiment was atmospheric and vague, rather than direct and intelligent.

A few years ago it would have been considered absurd; even to-day it may seem to some an exaggeration to attribute a large part and the better part of the changes which have been wrought, to the work of the American Missionary Association; but as the historic judgment clears with time, that fact is becoming more and more apparent. Long before the President's Proclamation had been dreamed of as a possibility, while statesmen and members of the Cabinet were busy with their fine jugglery of explanation, endeavoring to persuade the rebellious South that in fighting them they intended no harm to their favorite institution; while army officers, with an eye single to their constitutional obligations, were returning fugitive slaves to their masters in arms, while Northern churches shivered if they heard the word emancipation spoken in their pulpits—even then this Association was busy at Hampton with missionaries and teachers among the hundreds gathered there, whom General Butler had set free cutting the Gordian knot of difficulty with a legal phrase, flinging over them the protection of the flag as "contraband of war." It was a strange, exciting, pathetic scene, that at Hampton; who that saw it will ever forget it? That sleepy village, drowsing in the heat, in full sight of the picket lines of the Southern army; the sunrise and the sunset announced by cannon answering cannon from the opposing hosts. That dingy brick building, swarming in all its rooms and stairways and window seats with a motley crowd of all ages and both sexes, mostly in rags, holding in their hands tattered books of various titles and dates, the very roadsides lined with children and gray-haired men and women puzzling over the alphabet, some of them with no better helps than bark or chips on which the letters were rudely scrawled; the delicate cultured women from Northern homes moving about from group to group, full of enthusiasm and ready with helpful directions; the noisy shout of reciting voices every now and then interrupted by the blast of the bugle, or the hoof beats of a troop of cavalry sweeping past—that, and there was the primary school of the new order, the experimental beginning, which since then has been manifolded in every State once cursed with slavery, and to the benign influences of those efforts is chiefly