a part of the Bureau, will ever blacken the record of this
great institution. Not even ten additional years of slavery could have
done as much to throttle the thrift of the freedmen as the mismanagement
and bankruptcy of the savings bank chartered by the nation for their
especial aid. Yet it is but fair to say that the perfect honesty of
purpose and unselfish devotion of General Howard have passed untarnished
through the fire of criticism. Not so with all his subordinates,
although in the case of the great majority of these there were shown
bravery and devotion to duty, even though sometimes linked to narrowness
and incompetency.

The most bitter attacks on the Freedmen's Bureau were aimed not so much
at its conduct or policy under the law as at the necessity for any such
organization at all. Such attacks came naturally from the border states
and the South, and they were summed up by Senator Davis, of Kentucky,
when he moved to entitle the act of 1866 a bill "to promote strife
and conflict between the white and black races... by a grant of
unconstitutional power." The argument was of tremendous strength, but
its very strength was its weakness. For, argued the plain common sense
of the nation, if it is unconstitutional, unpracticable, and futile for
the nation to stand guardian over its helpless wards, then there is left
but one alternative: to make those wards their own guardians by arming
them with the ballot. The alternative offered the nation then was not
between full and restricted Negro suffrage; else every sensible man,
black and white, would easily have chosen the latter. It was rather a
choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had
flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature
stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not
a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible
without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there
was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard
emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.
In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a
necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race.
Had the opposition to government guardianship of Negroes been less
bitter, and the attachment to the slave system less strong, the social
seer can well imagine a far better policy: a permanent Freedmen's
Bureau, wit