But the question is, what did one see and hear, and what were the conclusions to which one was brought by personal observation? The fact that first forces itself on the eye in the towns, and often in the rural districts you pass through, is that there are multitudes of negroes loafing about, doing nothing. You see them at every station. When you come to make inquiries as to what they are doing, and how they subsist, and generally as to the state of the country, you are told that they are to be found in shoals in every town where there is a Freedman’s Bureau. They expect something from the Bureau; and, like so many coloured Micawbers, are drawn to the towns in the hope that something or other will turn up. So in the towns; but that in the country districts, where there is no power to restrain the idle and ill-disposed, things are in an actively bad condition—that this class has taken to stealing, and has not left on many properties a sweet potato or head of maize, or the pig that would have fed upon them—that they have made a clean sweep of everything edible. As to the state of the whites, that their condition is far more dreadful both to bear and to contemplate; for the blacks, as soon as they please to do the work they are accustomed to, may escape from their present distress, but that tens of thousands of white families, who lately were living in affluence and refinement, not knowing what it was either to want anything or to do anything for themselves, are now in a state of abject penury, positively of starvation; that many are without the means of procuring hominy and salt pork, the humblest fare in the country. And about this point there can be no doubt; for you have as evidence of the statement not only what Southerners say, but, as I afterwards found on returning to New York, the corroborative evidence of those good Northern people who are themselves subscribing largely to keep these destitute Southern families alive. In addition to all this, everyone tells you that he expects the unspeakable horrors of a war of races, which in their opinion cannot be adjourned for more than two years, as the coloured population are becoming day by day more and more dissatisfied with what the great change has hitherto done for them.