Doubtless the freed people have in many things been faulty. It would be strange indeed if a whole race could in the twinkling of an eye, put off the bad habits burned and ingrained into the very texture of their bodies and minds, by a heavy tyranny of two centuries and a half. Generations of freedom must pass before the evils can wholly disappear that generations of slavery have systematically and powerfully cultivated. But already, to a very great degree (to use the words of a recent comprehensive summary of the history of the Bureau,) "labor has been reorganized, justice has been secured, systems of education * * * have been established, the transition period from slavery to liberty has been safely passed, and the freed people have emerged from their state of bondage into that of the liberty of American citizenship." The operations of the Bureau and of the Commission which works in union with it, as a sort of unofficial counterpart--a draught-horse hitched on outside the thills--have sought four objects for the freedmen, in the following order: 1. To provide for their temporal wants; for if they had no food for to-day, and no clothes nor roofs to shelter them, they would be out of the world before they could learn their letters, earn a dollar, or learn to obey the law; 2. To promote justice; 3. To reorganize labor; 4. To provide education. In his difficult and laborious position, General Howard has had to act without the help of any public funds, by using temporarily certain species of abandoned property, and by means of details of officers and men from the army, who have done their work in the Bureau as part of their military duty, and without other than their usual pay. The good accomplished has been rather by the use of influence, by forbearance, by the exercise of the minimum of absolute authority. But in spite of the good intentions of Congress, the help of the Government of the United States, which, so far as its action upon the Freedmen's Bureau is concerned, is exclusively the executive, has not in any complete sense been given either to the freedmen themselves, in their toilsome upward road, nor to those who have been striving to aid them in the ascent; but it has rather been felt as a cold, sullen and grudging sufferance, verging even into a pretty distinct manifestation of an enmity like that of the worse class of unfriendly southern whites, and showing more than one token of an intention to destroy the Bureau and leave the freedmen helpless as soon as possible.