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has dimished by twenty five hundred (2500).  Next month and March I anticipate any free emigration and hope by the close of the present year that Elizbeth City County will have no more than a normal population. It will take two or three years for York County to become similarly reconstructed, owing to the greater difficulty of exit from there.  There will however remain in both counties a large destitute helpless class, unable to emigrate, for whom some permanent and liberal provision should be made by government; many of these were soldiers wives and children - now widows and orphans. Of these some are demoralised, worthless and thriftless, but very many are struggling to even live, and deserve relief in some form such as a suitable apportionment of land for which they might pay a reasonable price in a reasonable time.  They would thus be encouraged to build good cabins, and only thus be able to forsake a nomadic unsettled life with a weight of circumstances