enough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice
to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full
easy now to see that the man who lost home, fortune, and
family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by "mules and
niggers," was really benefited by the passing of slavery. It is
not difficult now to say to the young freedman, cheated and
cuffed about who has seen his father's head beaten to a jelly
and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the meek shall
inherit the earth. Above all, nothing is more convenient than
to heap on the Freedmen's Bureau all the evils of that evil
day, and damn it utterly for every mistake and blunder that
was made.

All this is easy, but it is neither sensible nor just. Someone
had blundered, but that was long before Oliver Howard was
born; there was criminal aggression and heedless neglect, but
without some system of control there would have been far
more than there was. Had that control been from within, the
Negro would have been re-enslaved, to all intents and pur-
poses. Coming as the control did from without, perfect men
and methods would have bettered all things; and even with
imperfect agents and questionable methods, the work accom-
plished was not undeserving of commendation.

Such was the dawn of Freedom; such was the work of the
Freedmen's Bureau, which, summed up in brief, may be
epitomized thus: for some fifteen million dollars, beside the
sums spent before 1865, and the dole of benevolent societies,
this Bureau set going a system of free labor, established a
beginning of peasant proprietorship, secured the recognition