h a national system of Negro schools; a carefully supervised
employment and labor office; a system of impartial protection before the
regular courts; and such institutions for social betterment as savings
banks, land and building associations, and social settlements. All this
vast expenditure of money and brains might have formed a great school of
prospective citizenship, and solved in a way we have not yet solved the
most perplexing and persistent of the Negro problems.

That such an institution was unthinkable in 1870 was due in part to
certain acts of the Freedmen's Bureau itself. It came to regard its work
as merely temporary, and Negro suffrage as a final answer to all present
perplexities. The political ambition of many of its agents and proteges
led it far afield into questionable activities, until the South, nursing
its own deep prejudices, came easily to ignore all the good deeds of the
Bureau, and hate its very name with perfect hatred. So the Freedmen's
Bureau died, and its child was the Fifteenth Amendment.

The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like
the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving
for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen's Bureau is the heavy heritage
of this generation. Today, when new and vaster problems are destined to
strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well
to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know:
despite compromise, struggle, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free.
In the backwoods of the Gulf states, for miles and miles, he may not
leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South
the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic
slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In
the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a
segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before
the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and
peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their
political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have
been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen's
Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not.

I have seen a land right merry with the sun; where children sing, and
rolling hills lie like passioned women, wanton with harvest. And there
in the King's Highway sat and s