es, 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 hospitals 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 success 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 organization 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 proprietors, 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 reasonable ambition to become a
landholder, which the nation had all but categorically promised the
freedmen--was destined 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,