difference and contempt.

Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition
to government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the
attachment to the slave system less strong, the social seer can
well imagine a far better policy,--a permanent Freedmen's
Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully
supervised employment and labor office; a system of impar-
tial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions
for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building
associations, and social settlements. All this vast expenditure
of money and brains might have formed a great school of
prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet
solved the most perplexing and persistent of the Negro
problems.

That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due
in part to certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came
to regard its work as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage
as a final answer to all present perplexities. The political
ambition of many of its agents and proteges led it far afield
into questionable activities, until the South, nursing its own
deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of
the Bureau and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the
Freedmen's Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth
Amendment.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is
done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a
legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's