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hope of making a crop.  These lands have been rented or leased to them for the one fourth of their product by persons who realize that an ear of corn is better than nothing - for, with these settlers, the land is valueless.  In most cases the Freedmen have to build a cabin to live in, fence the land, and clear so much land; and all this without a supply of provisions, without money, without wagons, ploughs or harrows - in some cases with and in others without an old and worthless horse, the former being much the better off, as then they have no horse to feed.  Some of the inevitable results of this pernicious system, the full effects of which are seen in Jamaica, have already developed themselves here, and others equally baleful remain to be developed in the future.

One of it's consequences is the fact that many honest and reliable farmers, offering from five to ten dollars a month and board, have not so many laborers as they desire and others have none at all - and, of course, their lands will remain untilled or be so much the less productive.  Then again these would-be planters must resort to theft to eke out a subsistence, and grevious complaints against them reach me every day from the neighborhoods where many of them are located; and thus - although I by no means believe that in all cases the Freedmen are guilty - ill will and bad feeling are generated in the minds of the Whites which, of course, produce the same feeling in the blacks, and so they mutually act and re-act on one another.

The prospective evil most to be dreaded is that they will not raise enough of corn and meat to support them and will become dependents on the charity of the Government in the course of the year or perish of want and the diseases thereby engendered.

But I do not wish the above remarks to be understood as applying to all the Freedmen who have located on lands, for a few of them have good lands, have