rally, 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 Amendment 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 assured and self-sustaining
place in the body politic and economic 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 instrument 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 unthinkable, the maddest of experiments.

The agents that the Bureau could command varied all the way from
unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and
even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst,
it was the occasional fly that helped spoil the ointment.

Then amid all crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and
foe. He had emerged from slavery,--not the worst slavery in the world,
not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had
here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness,--but
withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were
concerned, classed the black man and the ox together. And the Negro
knew full well that, whatever their deeper convictions may have been,
Southern men had fought with desperate energy to perpetuate this
slavery under which the black masses, with half-articulate thought, had
wr