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 due the advance which has been made in intelligence, and healthy ambition and domestic comfort, and religious growth, and manhood and womanhood, among the servile and despised race on this continent. The story of the hardships and self-sacrifice, and heroism of this Society, is a story that can never be told. Later on, similar enterprises and efforts were undertaken, but with all due credit to their importance, they were all copied after "the pattern shown them in the mount." In this world of short memories, we cannot too often review the record which constitutes the claim of this Association to signal affection and honor.