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0088

oughly unacquainted with the proprieties of life, and totally devoid of a manly and generous sentiment. They have in many instances used their authority to insult and oppress, and as frequently to degrade, by punishment, Southern ladies and gentlemen upon the mere statement of a negro. They have, in violation of the laws of the States, screened the negro from investigation and punishment for crimes and outrages, and they have made, in some instances, the negro a bad and violent member of the community; and generally a disappointed and dejected being at the failure of the bright dreams he hoped to realize by the aid of the Superintendent and his Bureau. Few hospitals have been established; but many camps, in which last, death and disease has enjoyed a never before known to the statistics of mortality. The negro leaving kind masters and comfortable homes, has vagabondized until necessity compelled him, as it does every one to work; that is those of them who lived to the first of the year. The rivers, the old fields and grave yards contain many thousands of them––once happy and contented––who under the ministrations of the Bureau, wandered from plenty to want, and at last to the grave. The Bureau still feebly exists, just enough to be mischievous and annoying. Its champion, the Rev. Dr. French, has recently been preaching to the negroes in South Carolina, and exhorting them to hold to the hands they have been ordered by Government to vacate. A few very plain and very pious New England school marms are teaching numerous and various sized colored ideas how to shoot. These are its only visible elements. Let them be swept away––or at least, let us have a division of furniture. Send a proportionate part of the Bureaus, with their accompaniments to the 'North, to care for the thousands of helpless, miserable and starving negroes, dragged during the war from their homes, and we may get along with the balance.