Viewing page 12 of 271

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

4

or their relations to their former masters, - of weak wills; unsuspecting; patient to the last degree; unskilled in business; inviting by their stupidity the avarice and injustice of their employer; their newly acquired freedom their only capital; their naked hands their only means of support; possessed in common with all races of idlers and vicious persons, taught, by the very institution under which they have lived, to cherish loose ideas of the right of property, yet like the Spartans extremely sly in their thefts, but on the whole, a race highly tractable, willing to receive and abide by good counsel.

To educate four hundred and thirty five thousand (435000) of these people, to protect them from hunger and suffering; to instruct them in honesty and morality and encourage habits of industry; to shield them from the gross misrepresentation, the overreaching avarice and abusive and brutal treatment of their former masters; to secure to them the protection as well as the restraints of law, and a fair administration of just laws in civil courts, is the part committed to the "Freedmen's Bureau". To it is entrusted the destiny and welfare of a race.

Though the field is so vast, yet the progress of last month has been rapid and encouraging