the paying of bounties, the administration of justice, and the
financiering of all these activities.

Up to June, 1869, over half a million patients had been
treated by Bureau physicians and surgeons, and sixty hospi-
tals and asylums had been in operation. In fifty months twenty-
one million free rations were distributed at a cost of over four
million dollars. Next came the difficult question of labor.
First, thirty thousand black men were transported from the
refuges and relief stations back to the farms, back to the
critical trial of a new way of working. Plain instructions went
out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose
their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and
there was to be no peonage or forced labor. So far, so good;
but where local agents differed toto caelo in capacity and
character, where the personnel was continually changing, the
outcome was necessarily varied. The largest element of suc-
cess lay in the fact that the majority of the freedmen were
willing, even eager, to work. So labor contracts were written,
--fifty thousand in a single State,--laborers advised, wages
guaranteed, and employers supplied. In truth, the organiza-
tion became a vast labor bureau,--not perfect, indeed, notably
defective here and there, but on the whole successful beyond
the dreams of thoughtful men. The two great obstacles which
confronted the officials were the tyrant and the idler,--the
slaveholder who was determined to perpetuate slavery under
another name; and, the freedman who regarded freedom as
perpetual rest,--the Devil and the Deep Sea.

In the work of establishing the Negroes as peasant propri-