All had the idea that in January the lands of their former masters were to be divided among them; and it was, therefore, almost impossible to make contracts with them for labor on the farms through the ensuing year. The inhabitants charged that this idea had been sedulously spread among them by the Yankee soldiers, and that they had been advised never to contract for more than a month’s work at a time, until the division of property came. Here is a specimen of the way in which the Lynchburg papers treated the difficulty: “The refusal of these people to make contracts for labor another year completely deranges all the regular and matured plans of our farmers. They know not what provision to make for feeding their employees; what extent of soil to mark out for seed; what kind of crops to cultivate, or what calculations to make upon their operations. If they sow, they are not certain to what extent they can reap; and if they attempt a variety of crops, (including tobacco,) they have no assurance whatever that their labor will not forsake them at the very moment that it is most indispensable. “A friend in Amherst suggests that the powers that be should issue an order to the effect that all who do not get homes, or show they have a support within themselves, by the 1st day of January, 1866, will, on the 10th of said month, (nine days’ notice being given,) be hired out to the highest bidder. Such an order would, in his opinion, cause all except the most worthless to secure homes before the 20th of December. These suggestions certainly seem to us to have wisdom in them, and to meet the difficulties, to some extent, that now so seriously embarrass and retard agricultural pursuits; and we respectfully commend them to the attention of the proper authorities. One thing is certain, that if the negroes are not made to enter into contracts, and to keep them when made, the most ruinous consequences will result to our farming interests, and provisions enough will not be made to feed our people another year. Some fanatics and deluded persons, we know, will laugh at this idea, and tell us that the South has never been so prosperous in the past as she will be in the future under our present system of labor. But taking the most favorable view of the subject, it is still manifest to every one at all familiar with the real condition of things, that freed negro labor never was and never can be made _productive_—that is to say, _accumulative_ or _progressive_; and that any reliance upon the _voluntary_ work of free negroes, beyond what is absolutely necessary to their sustenance, is both vain and foolish. And we predict now, with regret and pain, what the results will certainly show, that there will henceforth be a steady and permanent decline in all the productions of the South dependent upon negro labor, as there has been in the French and British emancipation islands; and