Gentlemen : It is not inappropriate to this occasion that an officer of the navy should address your honorable Society, and although your committee might easily have chosen a more worthy representative of that branch of the public service, they could have found none more sincerely interested in your cause or more deeply impressed with its importance. From the first disastrous effort, in 1819, to colonize the negroes from the United States at Sherbro, up to the present time, the Navy has contribu