The American Missionary | Page 2

wish this to be done by closing more schools and church doors against the poorest of our countrymen throughout the Southern lowlands and mountains, amid the Dakotas and Montana, from California to Florida.*
*The Association has come to the last half of its fiscal year. Up to this time it has made no special plea for help. It has waited fraternally until kindred organizations have received the aid they** so greatly needed. This vast Christian service in the most necessitous fields of the continent is as distinctively the trust of the churches as any of their enterprises are. Shall it not now have the same equitable relief as has been given to others? Has not the time now come for helping this suffering work? Will not those who have charged the Association with this burden of service now consecrate anew their benevolence to its relief and make this a Year of Jubilee, to wipe out the last vestige of debt?*
*It is proposed to raise during the next six months a special Jubilee Year Fund of $100,000 in shares of $50 each, with the hope and expectation that these shares will be taken by the friends of missions without lessening those regular contributions which must be depended upon to sustain the current work.*
*The plea is urgent because the need is urgent. Will not all friends of this great work, pastor and people, now heartily unite in one special Christian endeavor to raise this American Missionary Association Jubilee Year Fund?*
*Charles L. Mead,* * Samuel Holmes,* * Samuel S. Marples,* * William H. Strong,* * Elijah Horr,* * William Hayes Ward,* * Lucien C. Warner,* * James W. Cooper,* * Joseph H. Twichell,* * Charles P. Peirce,* * Charles A. Hull,* * Albert J. Lyman,* * Addison P. Foster,* * Nehemiah Boynton,* * A. J. F. Behrends*
*Executive Committee of the* * AMERICAN MISSIONARY ASSOCIATION.*

Our Industrial Work.
We publish in this number of THE MISSIONARY an article copied from The Talladega College Record, giving a detailed account of the industrial work carried on in that institution. We invite attention to it as showing the wide range of those industries, and of their thorough and systematic arrangement.

The School and Church.
As is the school and church in any nation or community, so are the people. The Chinese for ages with universal education, such as it is, and the religion of Confucius, are a superstitious, stagnant, and an unheroic race. Europe in the middle ages, with no schools and an ambitious hierarchy, became ignorant and war-like, oppressed in Church and State. In these United States, their abundant educational facilities and a free church have developed largely the most intelligent and free people on the earth. But we said "largely," for there are millions of people in this nation that are still in the lowest grades of ignorance and superstition. There are four millions of colored people who can neither read nor write, and have not yet escaped from the degrading effects of centuries of slavery. There are among the mountaineers of the South two millions of people, descendants of a noble race, who have for more than a hundred years been largely without schools or intelligent churches, and they have fallen far below the intelligence and enterprise of their fathers. Our American Indians, though comparatively a handful, still need our care. More than half their school population is without education or industrial habits.
It is among these unfortunate races that the American Missionary Association is doing its great work. It comes to them with its schools and churches--its schools religious and its churches intelligent--and throughout the wide range of its work, lifting them up in knowledge and the industries of life, and in all these directions it has accomplished great results, planting wisely with good seed, and is beginning already to reap large and continually enlarging harvests.
We print in this number of the MISSIONARY two articles written by Secretaries of the Association, which give reliable statements touching the deplorable needs of some of these people, and yet of the cheering transformations made in their condition by our schools and churches. We invite attention to these two articles.

The Year of Jubilee.
APPEAL FOR RELEASE FROM DEBT AND LIMITATIONS.

A Jubilee Fund of $100,000 in Shares of $50 Each.
We have come to our Year of Jubilee. Fifty years ago the American Missionary Association had a darker outlook than it has to-day. It saw 4,000,000 of people, children of a common Father, who were born under the skies of our common country, in a land of churches and Bibles, and saw them, not only with no legal rights, but not even the rights of persons, chattels under the law, bought and sold as things, in sin and degradation, and without hope in the world. That was a dark outlook.
But God's providence came, and now the