maintained and used military force, and dictated such mea-
sures as it thought necessary and proper for the accomplish-
ment of its varied ends. Naturally, all these powers were not
exercised continuously nor to their fullest extent; and yet, as
General Howard has said, "scarcely any subject that has to
be legislated upon in civil society failed, at one time or
another, to demand the action of this singular Bureau."

To understand and criticise intelligently so vast a work,
one must not forget an instant the drift of things in the later
sixties. Lee had surrendered, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson
and Congress were at loggerheads; the Thirteenth Amend-
ment was adopted, the Fourteenth pending, and the Fifteenth
declared in force in 1870. Guerrilla raiding, the ever-present
flickering after-flame of war, was spending its forces against
the Negroes, and all the Southern land was awakening as
from some wild dream to poverty and social revolution. In a
time of perfect calm, amid willing neighbors and streaming
wealth, the social uplifting of four million slaves to an as-
sured and self-sustaining place in the body politic and eco-
nomic would have been a herculean task; but when to the
inherent difficulties of so delicate and nice a social operation
were added the spite and hate of conflict, the hell of war;
when suspicion and cruelty were rife, and gaunt Hunger wept
beside Bereavement,--in such a case, the work of any instru-
ment of social regeneration was in large part foredoomed
to failure. The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in
the South which for two centuries and better men had refused
even to argue,--that life amid free Negroes was simply un-
thinkable, the maddest of experiments.