ir masters. They found themselves
in cities where every condition of life was different from their old
home. It was hardly to be expected that in one of these cases the
results should be as cheerful or as favorable as in the other. Nor was
it to be supposed that the policy to be pursued, in two such cases,
should be in outward form the same.

But the country has, on the whole, in the various different conditions
of these questions, had the advantage of great administrative ability.
General Butler, General Banks, and General Saxton are three men who may
well be satisfied with their military record, if it shall bear the test
of time as well as their administrative successes in this department bid
fair to do. We can be reconciled, in a measure, to gross failure and
want of system in other places, when we observe the successes which have
been wrought out for the blacks, in different ways, under the policy of
these three statesmen. For we believe that in that policy the principles
are to be found by which the Government ought at once to direct all its
policy in the use of its victories. We believe those principles are most
adequately stated in General Butler's General Order No. 46, issued at
Fort Monroe on the fifth of December last. For General Banks has had his
hands tied, from the beginning, by the unfortunate exemption from the
Emancipation Proclamation of the first two districts in Louisiana.
Considering the difficulties by which he was thus entangled, we have
never seen but he used to the best his opportunities. General Saxton's
island-district has been so small, and in a measure so peculiar, that it
may be urged that the result learned there would not be applicable on
the mainland, on a large scale. But General Butler has had all the
negroes of the sea-board of Virginia and North Carolina to look after.
He has given us a census of them,--and we have already official returns
of their _status_. There seems no reason why what has been done there
may not be done anywhere.

In General Butler's department, there were, in the beginning of April,
sixty-eight thousand eight hundred and forty-seven negroes. Of these,
eight thousand three hundred and forty-four were soldiers, who had
voluntarily enlisted into the service of the United States. These men
enlisted with no bounty but what the General so well named as the "great
boon awarded to each of them, the result of the war,--Freedom for
himself and his race forever." They enl