blacks crowded into Washington, do them great
injury. Had they been told years ago, "You _must_ find work; go
out and seek it," they would have been spared much misery. They
are an easy, worthless race, taking no thought for the morrow,
and liking to lean on those who befriend them. Your course
aggravates their weaknesses, when you should raise their ambition
and stimulate them to self-reliance. Unless you change your
course speedily and signally, the swarming of blacks to the
District will increase, and the argument that Slavery is their
natural condition will be immeasurably strengthened. So long as
they look to others to calculate and provide for them, they are
not truly free. If there be any woman capable of earning wages
who would rather some one else than herself should pay her
passage to the place where she can have work, then she needs
reconstruction and awakening to a just and honest self-reliance.

Yours, HORACE GREELEY.

MRS. J. S. GRIFFING, Washington, D. C.

_Sept. 12, 1870_.
HORACE GREELEY:

DEAR SIR:--Much as I respect your judgment, and admire your
candor, I must express entire dissent with your views in
reference to those who are laboring to befriend the Freedmen, and
also of your estimate of the character of the black race.

When you condemn my work for the old slaves, who can not labor,
and are "crowded into Washington" by force of events
uncontrollable, as a "great injury," I am at a loss to perceive
your estimate of any and all benevolent action. If, to provide
houses, food, clothing, and other physical comforts, to those
broken-down aged slaves whom we have liberated in their declining
years, when all their strength is gone, and for whom no home,
family friendship, or subsistence is furnished; if this is a
"great injury," in my judgment there is no call for alms-house,
hospital, home, or asylum in human society, and all
appropriations of sympathy and material aid are worse than
useless, and demand your earnest rebuke and discountenance, and
to the unfortunates crowded into these institutions, you should
say, "You must find work, go out and seek it." So far as an
humble individual can be, I am substituting to these a freedman