endurance and intrenched disease. Scrofula and its parasite kin are
domesticated in the debilitated blood, and pills, calomel, and death
jointly contend for the prolific cradle, and even when temporarily
defeated succeed in transforming childhood into unlovely age, without
the long interval of intermediate active, zestful manhood.

And yet, pitiful as is this exhibit of deficiency, these Highland
dwellers are none the less men and our brethren. Slavery robbed them of
their lands half a century ago, and roughly shouldered them off into the
mountain wilderness dowered with the pauperizing maxims of oppression,
notably the indignity of toil, and their shrewd native mother-wit has
been left to rust to dullard loss in the absence of schools worthy the
name; worse still, their natural devoutness has been warped by unworthy
shepherds, till superstition, bigotry, and gross immorality have taken
fierce possession of many a society, hearthstone and heart. If to-day
the schools are inefficient and some of the preaching blasphemous; if
self-satisfied idleness has turned over this mountain realm to want and
the slavery of low living, and (as ever) made woman at once the servant
and the victim of its barbarism, it is but another historic count in the
awful indictment of human selfishness. And all these crying deficiencies
are but make-weights with our conviction of responsibility to this
mountain flock of God, that often has been misled and unworthily
sacrificed.

The only problematical element in this matter is the measure of our
faith in God and man and all-prevailing truth. Wherever the ground has
been broken by faithful men there is a crop to show as returns for
invested toil. More than a thousand children are now under Christian
instruction in our schools. Our pupils are in hungry demand as teachers,
even to a minimum of years that to us would seem absurd (15 and 16