2. But there will remain the other larger class, consisting in the main of women and children and farm laborers, who must find employment on the abandoned lands. To this labor they are accustomed. These lands are their natural home. But this class must naturally and logically come under the charge of the department which has charge of the abandoned lands. Conceding that all in the military service fall under the superintendence of the War Department, it follows with equal reason that all who labor on the lands must fall under the superintendence of the Treasury Department, so long, at least, as this department has charge of the lands. This conclusion seems so reasonable that your Committee were not able to resist it. But the testimony of persons who have given particular attention to the question is also explicit; so that experience is in harmony with reason. I have in my hands a letter from Colonel McKaye, an eminent citizen of New York, and also a member of the Commission to inquire and report on this subject, appointed by the Secretary of War. After visiting South Carolina and Louisiana, expressly to study the necessities of freedmen, and to ascertain what could be done to benefit them, he thus expresses himself:-- “_In the first place_, everybody who has had any _practical experience_ of the working of the plantations or of the superintendence of negro labor will tell you that _the control of the abandoned plantations and the care of the colored people must be in the same hands_.” You will not fail to observe how positively this _expert_ speaks. According to him, all who have had “practical experience” insist that the care of the freedmen and of the plantations should be “in the same hands”; and so important does he regard this point that he places it first in consideration. But Colonel McKaye is not alone. Here is a letter from Hon. Robert Dale Owen, Chairman of the Commission on Freedmen, appointed by the Secretary of War, which testifies as follows:-- “It will never do to have Treasury agents who lease the lands to white men, and War Department agents who assign the same lands to colored people. Nothing but confusion and conflict of authority can result. It will not work at all. But even if it would, why employ two sets of agents to do what one set can do much better? And who is to inspect the leased plantations, and see to it that neither employers nor employed are wronged? The men who gave the leases? But they are Treasury agents, and have nothing to do with freedmen. Or the Freedmen’s Commissioners? But what authority can they have over men who do not hold their leases from them? _The men who have the care of the laborer ought to have the leasing of the land and the inspection of the leases_; and they should be authorized to lease equally to white and to colored people.” Such a statement is an argument.