The Freedmen's Bureau sought to establish Negroes as peasant
proprietors of the soil on the farms and plantations of the stricken
South, and dreams of "forty acres and a mule" for a long time
possessed the more ambitious only, in many instances, to meet a rude
awakening; but notwithstanding the fact that the system of renting
land, combined with the credit system of obtaining the necessities of
life while waiting for the production and sale of the crop, is not
conducive to the ownership of land on the part of the tenant;
notwithstanding the very natural tendency on the part of the Negro to
disassociate ideas of freedom and of tilling the soil, added to a
desire to segregate in large cities in place of branching out to the
sparsely settled districts of the great West and Northwest, there to
take up rich farming lands and by a pioneer life to mend his fortunes
in company with the peasants of other nations who are thus acquiring a
firm foothold and a competence for their descendants; we repeat--in
spite of the facts mentioned--before the close of the century the
Negro had accumulated farms and homes valued in the neighborhood of
seven hundred and fifty million dollars; personal property valued at
one hundred and seventy millions; and had raised eleven millions for
educational purposes. From these, and such other statistics as are
available, relative to the achievements of the Negro in the United
States during the nineteenth century, bearing in mind our first
proposition--the measure of the success of a people is the depths
from which it has come--we conclude that educationally, morally,
financially, the Negro has accomplished by means of the opportunities
at his command about all that could be expected of him or any other
race under similar conditions.

That the Negro has made mistakes goes without saying. All races as