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593

often, their supplies attended to, teachers set right when they were wrong, transferred from one place to another more suitable; the people have been [[?]] inspired with zeal, and when they failed to keep their pledges and do their duty, the teacher has been promptly taken away and given to another people who could do better. All of this has made these schools very useful. The schools have been at least fifty percent better the attendance more full and regular, and the people have been educated in their duty and put on the plan of self-reliance and self-help. Their drinking habits have been somewhat check, and whiskey money turned into school money. The same work has been done in the Southern and So. Western part of the state by C. S. Schaeffer, another asst. supt. for the schools of the Philadi Friends.

Now, with such supervision county schools can not only be made very useful, but can be conducted very cheaply. The board and incidentals would be furnished by the people. If some places will not do it, others will. The Virginia Colored teachers would require, some of them $10. per month salary, others $15. and very few if any of them more, unless they have already had more.

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and have special merits. Without this active supervision, county schools and teachers, left to themselves, would amount to very little.

I have just returned from Washington, and there seems to be very little probability of any appropriation by Congress for Educational purposes. This is the opinion of all who have the best opportunities to form an opinion.

To close the schools now - such interesting country schools as I have just been visiting -  would be an unspeakable disaster. The thought of losing the school-houses which the freedmen have erected (aided by the Bureau) with so much sacrifice, and which are to them such fountains of light as well as of hope, is so painful that I cannot endure it with composure. It is a cruelty and a wrong which our Republican Congress would not commit if it had any conception of the evil involved.

You need expect nothing from the state of Virginia. It will do nothing for a long time to come, for two reasons. It can't if it would, and it wouldn't if it