etors, the Bureau was from the first handicapped and at last
absolutely checked. Something was done, and larger things
were planned; abandoned lands were leased so long as they
remained in the hands of the Bureau, and a total revenue of
nearly half a million dollars derived from black tenants. Some
other lands to which the nation had gained title were sold on
easy terms, and public lands were opened for settlement to
the very few freedmen who had tools and capital. But the
vision of "forty acres and a mule"--the righteous and rea-
sonable ambition to become a landholder, which the nation
had all but categorically promised the freedmen--was des-
tined in most cases to bitter disappointment. And those men
of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the
Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or
ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro
peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the
Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau had to go to South
Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of
toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake--
somewhere. If by 1874 the Georgia Negro alone owned three
hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, it was by grace of
his thrift rather than by bounty of the government.

The greatest success of the Freedmen's Bureau lay in the
planting of the free school among Negroes, and the idea of
free elementary education among all classes in the South. It
not only called the school-mistresses through the benevolent
agencies and built them schoolhouses, but it helped discover
and support such apostles of human culture as Edmund Ware,
Samuel Armstrong, and Erastus Cravath. The opposition to