1. We are aware that one objection to our plan of placing the freedmen in a comparatively independent position from their old masters and their posterity, is its magnitude. But that is no valid reason why it should not be adopted. If it cannot be wholly accomplished in a generation or a century, let it be done, so far as it can be, in our generation, and continued by our successors until it shall be finished.

Under God, Moses undertook to lead the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage into the promised land. In doing it they were forty years in the wilderness, but in due time the thing was accomplished and passed into history. The magnitude of the project and the time required for its accomplishment were no objections to its being undertaken. It is true we have no Moses to lead the freedmen into our western prairies, but we have the same God to work under that Moses had.

2. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, when it began its work, had no expectation of converting the world to Christianity in a generation or a century; but that was no reason why it should not organize and go to work, leaving for its successors to finish what it then only began. The same is true of the Home Missionary Society work, and that of the American Missionary Association, which has the freedmen under its care especially. The work of both of these societies will be greatly facilitated by taking the freedmen from the clutches of the old slave oligarchy, and placing them in an independent civil position on our boundless prairies, and in cities and villages where they can care for themselves, their families, and their country, with none to molest nor make them afraid; a work which neither of the above societies can do, under their present constitutions.

Where they are, Col. Preston, of Virginia, in a paper addressed to the American Missionary Association at its annual meeting said: "There is no place for them as legislators, and no room for them among the whites as doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, architects, or artists. By other pursuits they must gain their livelihood, and for other pursuits they must be trained."

It will be observed that agriculture is left out of the colonel's catalogue, and, of course, must be included in the "other pursuits" by which the freedmen "must gain their livelihood." Now we propose to place them on the best farming lands on this continent, where they can not only gain a "livelihood," but qualify themselves for any and all of the above occupations and professions, with no rifle clubs to keep them in subjection to the ruling class of whites.

President Fairchild, of Berea College, said that the above quotation was a "leaden weight hung upon the neck of the colored youth."

Our plan proposes to put them in a position to shake off that "leaden weight," and rise in the scale of humanity in consonance with their just deserts.

It can but commend itself to the friends of the freedmen.