loyments and their old modes of life,
must not leave them, helpless and without resources, to find such
occupations as they may. The sacred obligation rests upon us to give
them some suitable employment from which they can procure present
subsistence and commence that career of industry and improvement which,
it is to be hoped, will soon prove them to have been worthy of the boon
unintentionally bestowed upon them by the authors of this wicked and
insane rebellion. Some other governments, in seasons of distress arising
from ordinary causes, do not hesitate to acknowledge the duty of finding
work for the laboring masses, who would otherwise suffer and become
dangerous in their distress and desperation; but there is no case in
which the obligations of government toward an unfortunate people are
half so strong and imperative as those which, under existing
circumstances, rest upon the United States. They have the double
responsibility of past complication in the wrong of slavery, and of
present participation in the act of suddenly terminating it.

Doubtless an effective system of colonization, beyond our limits, will
be gradually established, and the Africans in this country will
eventually find it to be their interest to separate themselves from us
and to go in large numbers to Central America or to their native
continent. But this process must necessarily be slow, and cannot
properly take place on any very large scale until the negroes shall be
to some extent trained in the proper habits of freedom and prepared to
become citizens of some country in which their rights of equality will
be fully acknowledged, not merely theoretically and by profession, but
in substance and in actual practice. Moreover, they cannot be sent away
with advantage to us, or, indeed, by means of any available resources
applicable to that end, until their places shall be supplied by European
immigrants, or until the increase of our own white population shall
enable us to dispense with their services amongst us, and aid them in
finding and settling better homes, in which they may pursue their
destined course of progress, unhindered by that fatal competition and
unconquerable prejudice which meet them here. It is evident that no
possible scheme of colonization can relieve us from the duty of
providing for the present and immediate necessities of the vast numbers
of freed men who will shortly be thrown upon us by the progress of the
war, and as the dir