's
(relief) bureau; sanitary commission; church sewing society, to
aid the poor; orphan asylum; old people's home; hospital and
alms-house for the sick and the blind; minister-at-large, to
visit the sick, console the dying, and bury the dead; and wherein
I fail, and perhaps you discriminate, is the want of wealthy,
popular, and what is called honorable associations. Were these at
my command, with the field before me, it would be easy to
illustrate the practical use as well as the divine origin of the
Golden Rule.

If, in your criticism, you refer to my secondary department in
which I have labored to furnish employment to the Freedmen both
in the District and out, is it not a direct reflection upon all
efforts made for the distribution of labor? Is my course more
aggravating to the weakness of destitute unemployed freed people,
than emigrant societies, intelligence offices, benevolent ladies'
societies, and young men's Christian associations, to give work
to the poor of all nations; and lastly the Government Indian
department, that has wisely called to its aid the American
missionary, and the Quaker societies, to farm out the poor
Indians? or, if the measures put forth by these admissible agents
can raise the ambition and stimulate to self-reliance their
beneficiaries, will you be good enough to show wherein the same
means, which I claim to employ, must have the opposite effect
upon the freedmen crowded into Washington.

Is it possible that the swarming of the Irish, Swiss, and German
poor, to the city of New York, is attributable to the
intelligence offices and immigration societies of your city, and
not, as we have supposed, to the want of work and bread at home,
and is there really a danger, that in providing and calculating
for them, we shall strengthen the argument of race, while our
institutions of charity are filled with descendants of the Saxon,
the Norman, the Goth, and the Vandal? I think not.

Respectfully yours, JOSEPHINE S. GRIFFING.

_From the New National Era._

MRS. JOSEPHINE S. GRIFFING THE ORIGINATOR OF THE FREEDMEN's
BUREAU.

This truly excellent and noble woman was fitly spoken of in the
_New National Era_ just after her death, but at that early date
it was not possible to obta