Part 2

There is a general feeling outside of, and it is encouraging to believe even in, the South, that a new state of things is desirable for that section of the country. No one who has seen its homes, schools, churches, industries (or want of them), its literature—in short, whatever at once marks and constitutes its civilization, and knows how meager and unworthy it is, but assents to the proposition that the South needs to be regenerated, and heartily wishes that “old things might pass away and all become new.” In one way or another, New England has supplemented her earnest wish for it with most earnest efforts to accomplish this regeneration. To say nothing of legislative attempts by the Government, thousands of missionaries, at an expense of millions of dollars, during the past fifteen years, have, with great self-denial and laborious effort, attempted the task, and the reports are abundant and uniform that these efforts are beginning to have their effect. Old prejudices are yielding; new industries and new institutions, the outcome of new ideas, are springing up; society is changing, and the country is beginning to put on a new aspect. Never before have the societies and laborers engaged in this work been so cheered and encouraged by the outlook.

It may be well at this point to ask, toward what ideal we are working, and fairly to consider the forces that are co-operating with, or working against, us in this effort. The most potent factor in the creation of a new South must be, of course, the South itself, as of necessity she will be chiefly the architect of her own fortunes, good or bad.

It would be unwise, and the effort would prove futile, to attempt its reconstruction by outside influences and agencies, in utter disregard of the fact that to her belongs the right, and upon her devolves the duty, as she alone possesses the power, of shaping her own destiny. This being the case, it becomes evident that the new South is not to be a New England in the South, and our Yankee egotism should not measure the progress made in that section simply by its observable approximation to Northern ideals. New England, as it is, could not have been built except upon New England’s hills, and we shall never see it in the cotton fields, rice swamps and everglades of the sunny South.

Other influences than those that are merely ethnic and moral help to mold the character of a people, and to develop the industries by which it shapes its civilization. We dare not think what the result to our Republic would have been had the Mayflower found the mouth of the Mississippi River instead of Plymouth harbor, and had the Pilgrim Fathers settled on the savannahs of Louisiana instead of the bleak hills of New England. The intelligent and thrifty New England farmer, transplanted to Florida, may not, indeed, degenerate into an everglade “cracker,” whose “strength is to sit still” and chew tobacco; but he cannot be a New England farmer in Florida, for the reason that he has neither the climate, soil nor products of his old farm, and none of the conditions which partly prompted, and partly compelled, the thrift which has characterized the farmers of New England.

New England has emptied itself, probably more than once, into the West; she has sent her sons and daughters out into the great prairies with the school-house and the church, and they have built them homes hallowed and made beautiful by these influences, but they have not reproduced Yankee New England, and they never can.

In the new South, the ugly mud-daubed log huts will give place to neat cottages; the school-houses will be multiplied until all her children shall possess facilities for acquiring education; churches, supplied with an educated ministry, will be accessible to all inhabitants; roads will be built, over which it will be possible to travel with comfort; the immense tracts of land now impoverished and running to waste will be brought under cultivation; a Christian conscience will displace a false code of honor among the people as a rule of conduct, and methods more civilized than the pistol and bowie-knife will be resorted to in adjusting misunderstandings among neighbors. All this will be, and of this there are evident tokens that it is now coming in. But the wide diversity of soil and climate and other conditions of life, the antipodal ideas which have shaped the character of the people, the heterogeneous elements which more and more are entering into the make-up of the population of the different sections—in short, the necessities of the case, make it absolutely certain that New England is to be confined to New England, and greatly modified even there, and that the civilizations of the South and the West are to be in many respects widely different, possessing characteristics as marked, and doubtless as valuable, as those which have made the influence of New England so beneficent upon the country at large. It is wise, as it is also incumbent upon us, to supply the educational influences which shall change the whole aspect of Southern society, but foolish to undertake to cast it in the exact form of that which we are proud to call New England.

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MTESA AND THE RELIGION OF HIS ANCESTORS.

In 1875, Stanley wrote in the _London Telegraph_ of the wonderful opening in Uganda, at the court and among the people of Mtesa, for missionary effort. Within three days after the publication of his letter, the Church Missionary Society received, from an unknown giver, $25,000, which was soon increased by the same person to $50,000, for opening a mission among the Waganda.

The reception of the mission, which was soon sent out, was most encouraging. The opposition of the Mohammedan Arabs, bitter as it was, did not materially interfere with its prospects. The king seemed intelligently alive to the fact that there was something, at least, in a Christian _civilization_ infinitely superior to what was offered in Mohammedanism or heathenism. For a time, everything progressed most encouragingly; the king and all his people gave themselves assiduously to the new doctrines, and the work of the mission was interrupted only temporarily by a suspicion on the part of the king that the missionaries were emissaries of the Khedive of Egypt, and were intriguing in his interest. This jealousy was soon allayed, friendly relations were restored, and the work was fully resumed, when there appeared upon the scene ten Jesuit missionaries, sent out by the Archbishop of Algiers, with instructions to occupy every station of the Protestant missionary societies in the region of Victoria Nyanza and Tanganika, with the intention of carrying the French language and influence into the depths of Central Africa.

Their coming endangered for a time the life of the mission, and their settlement near the palace by the king proved to be a serious obstacle to the prosecution of its work. They gladly bribed the king with gifts of arms and ammunition, articles eagerly sought by him, but refused by the Protestant missionaries. They immediately assumed a most hostile attitude toward the mission; denounced the missionaries as liars, and threw the king and court into the greatest perplexity. “What am I to believe?” cried the king. “Who is right? First, I was a heathen, then a Mohammedan, then a Christian; now some more white men come and tell me these English are liars. Perhaps if I follow them, other white men will come and tell me these are liars also.”

After a time, matters had settled down to comparative quiet. The missionaries appealed to the word, which they were rapidly teaching the people to read. King and people were learning with an eagerness like that manifested by the Freedmen of the South after the surrender. The king had the prayers written out in Arabic characters, and ordered many copies, so that all might join in the Sunday services; and such was the evident interest of all, that neither the efforts of the Moslems, made after the fast of Ramadhan last autumn, to have their creed introduced, nor the opposition of the Jesuits, availed to hinder the work.

But there was a danger greater than the joint opposition of Arab and Frenchman, of Islam and Loyola, with their confederates of the slave trade—an adversary more to be dreaded, because indigenous to the country, not foreign, and entrenched more deeply and strongly in the African nature than any possible influence by which he could be swayed.

Messrs. Mackay and Litchfield were in November last anxiously awaiting the return of Mr. Felkin from England, whither he had gone with the Uganda chiefs, being in sore need of more paper to meet the demand made for printed cards and pages of the Scriptures. Mr. Pearson was at Kagei, where he had gone to bring some machinery from that point to Rubaga. This he was not able to do and was compelled to return without it. On arriving at Buganga his request to be allowed to go on was refused, because Mokassa, one of the Lubari of the Nyanza, had possession of a part of the lake, and no one could pass over it. At the same time a number of half-caste traders were kept waiting at Rubaga, not allowed to proceed to Unyanyembe until this Neptune, god or devil of the lake should return home. Messrs. Mackay and Litchfield heard from time to time that the Lubare was expected at court to cure the king of his sickness. One day they ventured to introduce the subject of his or her (for in this case the Lubare is an old woman who personifies the spirit or devil of the lake), coming. The king entered heartily into the subject and translated to his chiefs all that was said by the missionaries. They said to him, if Lubare is a god, then there are two gods in Uganda—Jehovah and Mokassa. If he is a man, then there are two kings in Uganda—Mtesa, who has given permission for these traders to depart, and Mokassa, who has forbidden it.

The next day, an order was sent for the traders to depart, and the king proposed to his court that some cattle should be given to the Lubare and she should be ordered to go back the way she came.

Weeks passed, and it seemed doubtful whether the king would triumph or the old chiefs and the king’s mother, who insisted that the Lubare should have houses erected for her in the king’s inner court. Mtesa himself said to Mr. Mackay, “I believe what you say is true, and that every Lubare is a liar, and deceives the people only to get food.”

There was a gathering of the old chiefs, and the king was advised by them that the missionaries had come to take possession of the country, and were laboring to change its customs as a preliminary step to conquering them altogether. Evidently the king was afraid of the chiefs. The missionaries were at length summoned to court, where were gathered the chiefs and a vast concourse of people. At length the king announced the result of the council: “We shall now have nothing more to do with either the Arabs’ or the white men’s religion; but we shall return to the religion of our fathers.” Every one assented with a simultaneous motion of hands. The next day, the beating of drums announced the great procession which accompanied the Mokassa to the palace.

The pupils have all ceased to come to the mission; a time of persecution is anticipated by those who have inclined to Christianity; and everything looks dark for the mission, which had been planted at great expense, with so much hope. It is emphatically Satan’s hour of triumph; but we feel assured that the hour of the Son of Man also draweth near, and this darkest is the hour before the dawning of the day.

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BEGGING LETTER.

[We give a prominent place in our pages to Mrs. Chase’s letter, hoping it may meet with speedy and abundant answers. These calls, dear friends, are frequent, and they are urgent; but they are the calls of our Divine Lord in the person of His poor children, that we give them a fair chance to rise up from the degradation into which they have been thrust, and in which wicked prejudice and selfishness would keep them. We earnestly hope Mrs. C.’s experience of ten years ago will be by as much more blessed in your responses, as our encouragement in this work, and apprehensions of its value, are enlarged.—ED. MISS.]

ATLANTA, GA.

Begging letters! How you hate them! so do we! How often have we been deluded with the hope that there was to be no more need of this unpleasant duty. Friends unexpectedly come to the rescue of needy students. Often since 1869 large donations have set our feet upon mountain tops when we had expected to remain years in the valleys. But every little while we have to meet our old bug-bear. After one year’s absence we had been back but a few days when President Ware said, “These twenty-six new rooms are to be furnished; you’ll write some letters for us, won’t you, Mrs. Chase?” Now that means begging; but those of you who know anything of the type of President Ware’s devotion to Atlanta University, know that the only reply possible for his friends to make would be, “Certainly, sir.” So here I am doing the thing you and I hate.

This begging money to furnish rooms brings up so many memories, I must ask you to indulge me in a few reminiscences.

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Eleven years ago we had but one building—teachers, scholars, sleeping-rooms, dining room, etc., all crowded into that one. Enough furniture was sent from an abandoned school in Augusta to make the teachers’ rooms comfortable. In the students’ rooms, a barrel with a board on it did the double duty of washstand and table. In the summer of 1870, a new building for young men was well on its way. It was our first summer in Atlanta. Some one suggested that it would be pleasant to have individual friends, Sunday-schools and churches furnish the dormitories, and keep with us a memento of their generosity by placing the donor’s name over each door.

How well I remember with what enthusiasm I sat down, ten years ago, to write my first begging letter. I gazed then upon this same charming view that I am feasting my eyes upon at this moment, and drank in hope and courage from this wide north view, with the strong old Kenesaw towering in the distance.

Soon responses came. You little realize how much joy has been brought to weary teachers on opening letters with a twenty-five-dollar check for a room. One such occasional letter compensated for many chilling ones, and lightened the weary hours spent in timidly addressing this friend and that. Nearly all of us turned beggars, and soon had the name of our home church or Sunday-school, our native town or some dear friend, beaming down upon us as we walked through the buildings. At length, every student’s room became sacred to the memory of some faithful friend of the Freedmen. Some donations came as thank-offerings for dear ones restored to health. At the end of one corridor is a group of four rooms where three are named for three sisters whose husbands have all been engaged in Southern work, and the fourth bears the name of their sainted grandfather, whose prayers and tears, mingling with multitudes all over our land, doubtless hastened on the glad day his eyes were never here permitted to see.

In the wing of the young men’s building is a room furnished by a gentleman who named it for a dear brother stricken down by consumption when nearly through his studies, and who gave great promise of usefulness. This gentleman has had a book-case placed in that brother’s room, and sends frequent donations of books for the use of the occupants of “Ferrier” room.

An Andover schoolmate, an Abbott Academy girl, named a room for her father, a devoted friend of the slave, and sends for its walls pictures, brackets, etc. Abbott Academy, as a school, has furnished a room in each building. One room is named for Dr. Gurley, of Washington, Abraham Lincoln’s beloved pastor. Just beside it is “Alice Carey,” in memory of an only daughter, a precious bud opening under brighter skies. Opposite is the name of the devoted father.

“Celeste,” my dearest companion in girlhood, though so angelic then, speaks to me _now only_ of her celestial home.

“Little,” the young physician, brave soldier, and devoted husband of another dear friend, reminds me of the sweet promise that the darkness shall some time be made light.

So each of the hundred rooms has some history, many doubtless very precious to the donors, while unknown to us.

I must write of one more name, “Clarke,” which always deeply moves me. In 1862, our lamented E. P. Smith, whose earthly life went out in the Dark Continent, was laboring with his efficient and devoted wife in the hospitals of Nashville, Tenn., under the Christian Commission. Their first-born and only son, Clarke, sickened and died. Instead of leaving their post, heartbroken, they remained at the side of those wounded and dying soldiers, enclosed the precious dust in its little casket, and sent it to their dear Northern home.

In 1870, without any personal appeal, but in response to a letter in the MISSIONARY, soliciting aid in furnishing rooms, came a precious note, calling down upon us and our work benedictions, of which so many have felt the inspiration, and closing with, “Please find enclosed $40 for a room in Atlanta University; please name it Clarke.

Yours, for the Master,

E. P. SMITH.”

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This summer, through the generosity of R. R. Graves, a large wing, which has been so much needed, is being added to the girls’ building. $25 will buy a neat, plain set of furniture for each of the rooms. I am sure there are some friends who will be glad to know of this further opportunity of sending $25 and some dear name.

Yours very truly,

MRS. T. N. CHASE.

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AFRICAN NOTES.

—_Lovedale_: THE MISSIONARY, a few months since, gave facts to substantiate the assertion that the Free Church’s Industrial and Mission School at Lovedale was one of the busiest in the world. A magnificent pile of new buildings, which will cost £10,000, will soon meet the demand for enlargement which has been most urgent. The old school buildings will still be used, and these, with the new, the girl’s boarding-house, and the shops required for the various trades, will form a collegiate establishment of which Scotland may well be proud.

Lovedale is the centre and source of healthful educational and saving influences which are reaching out into a large portion of Southern Africa—a true missionary centre. It has a large native church under charge of a native pastor, who has studied the Scriptures in their original language. A missionary association has connected with it several Kaffir young men who preach in all the kraals of the vicinity, and Evangelists who have carried the gospel to Nyassa, and even to Tanganyika. It has also a literary society, a training society, a Young Men’s Christian Association, and other societies such as the best-working churches of this country find necessary for best efficiency.

—The Free Church of Scotland, since the death of Capt. Benzie, of the _Ilala_, and of Mr. Gunn, last April, are making explorations with a view to a removal of their Station from Livingstonia to a more healthful location. The probable site is Bandawi, midway on the western shore of Nyassa, and contiguous to the promising tribes of the Atonga and the Mangoni, who have reproached the missionaries for not settling among them. The Royal Geographical Society has published in its proceedings the letter of Mr. Stewart, the civil engineer of the Mission, describing his explorations in search of this site, with two maps showing his route on the western coast.

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—A Mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States on the West Coast of Africa, at Cape Mount, among the Vey people, has been commenced under the supervision of a young man of such energy, talent and Christian spirit, as give promise of successful prosecution.

It will be remembered that the Veys are distinguished as the only tribe on the continent of Africa which has invented an alphabet, and a missionary of the Church Missionary Society has made a grammar of their language. The natives are able to communicate with each other by written letters of their own invention.

Those interested in the evangelization of Africa will rejoice in the establishment of this Mission, and will watch with unusual interest its success among these, the most interesting of all the tribes on the west African coast.

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—The success of the Belgian Exploration Company in the use of elephants imported from Asia, for the transportation of its baggage, has doubtless suggested the formation of a company at Monrovia for the capture of native elephants for the same purpose. Vice-President Warner is president of the company, and a hunter of great experience is in charge of an expedition which has been equipped and sent out for the purpose of capturing some of these noble animals, and there is hope that they will prove so valuable that they will be esteemed for more than their tusks, and their wholesale slaughter will cease.

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—_Malugsy needle-work_ is so superior to that of the English that it does not pay to send to Madagascar made-up goods, as the natives speak with contempt of the bad sewing, and insist that the cost of picking it out shall be deducted from the price of such articles.

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—The London Missionary Society announces the safe arrival at Zanzibar, on the 29th of May, of the Revs. A. J. Wookey and D. Williams, with Dr. Palmer, on their way to the Central African Mission.

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—_The Stanley Pool Expedition_ of the Livingstone Island Mission, under the leadership of Mr. Adam McCall, is supposed to have reached the Congo about the 20th of April. The last tidings were written within three days of landing, and were very favorable. Donkeys and kroomen had been secured, and of the latter several were warm-hearted native Christians, who will, it is hoped, render good service as fellow-laborers in the Gospel.

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ITEMS FROM THE FIELD.

MARIETTA, GA.—On the Sabbath, June 6th, the new church, which is also to be used as a school building, at Marietta, Ga., was dedicated. The sermon, by Superintendent Roy, was upon the rebuilding of the Temple by the ex-captives. A Presbyterian minister from Pennsylvania being present, offered the prayer of dedication. The house is 24×40 feet, well finished and painted, and furnished with desks that answer the double purpose of church and school use. The people raised $200 toward the building. Prof. T. N. Chase gave the people a Sunday supply, reporting his visit to Africa. Two young business men in Illinois put each $25 into this Christian investment.

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TALLADEGA, ALA.—The students are doing good service during vacation, teaching in day and Sabbath Schools, and keeping up with their studies so as not to fall behind if unable to return at the beginning of the term. One who is teaching for the third season at Hackneyville, Ala., has his sister, also a pupil from this college, associated with him. At a recent picnic on the school grounds, held for the purpose of creating an interest in education, leading citizens, both white and black, made addresses.

Swayne Hall, of which we have seen a fine photograph, is too good a building to be allowed to rot down, as it is doing, for want of $3,000 needed to save it and put it in proper shape for the most efficient service. Will not some one save $15,000 to Talladega College by sending his checque for $3,000?

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