General Howard has done all that could be done, against these obstacles. It is easy to see what constant exercise he must need, of the Christian virtues of forbearance, patience, kindness, and the overcoming of evil with good, as well as of the moral qualities of honor and justice, and the soldierly attainments of order, promptitude and industry. With some of these he must meet the angry tricks of white enemies; with some, the pitiful faults--which are misfortunes rather--faults of the freedmen themselves--idleness, falsehood, dishonesty, disorder, incapacity, fickleness; with others still, the inactive resistance of his superiors, and the cumbrous machinery of an organization which the nature of the case prevents from coming into good working shape. In spite of all obstacles, the Missionary General and his Bureau and the Commission have done much. Up to the first day of 1867, fourteen hundred schools had been established, with sixteen hundred and fifty-eight teachers and over ninety thousand pupils; besides 782 Sabbath Schools with over 70,000 pupils; and the freedmen were then paying towards the support of these schools, out of their own scanty earnings, after the rate of more than eleven thousand dollars a month. Within one year, they had accumulated in their savings bank, $616,802.54. Many of them have bought and possess homesteads of their own. Their universal obedience to law would be remarkable in any community in the world, and under such treatment as they have experienced from their former masters since the war, would have been simply impossible for the body of freemen in the most law-abiding of the Northern States. And above all, they are with one accord most zealous, most diligent and most successful, in laboring to obtain the religious and intellectual culture which alone can fit them for their new position, as self-governing citizens of a free country. The views of intelligent army officers, of the task which General Howard undertook in accepting this post and of his fitness for it, are not without interest. Col. Bowman thus describes the work: "He was placed at the head of a species of Poor Law Board, with vague powers to define justice and execute loving kindness between four millions of emancipated slaves and all the rest of mankind. He was to be not exactly a military commander, nor yet a judge of a Court of Chancery; but a sort of combination of the religious missionary and school commissioner, with power to feed and instruct, and this for an empire half as large as Europe. But few officers of the army would have had the moral courage to accept such an appointment, and fewer still were as well fitted to fill it and discharge one-half its complicated and multifarious duties." When General Howard, on accepting his new post, advised his old commander by letter, General Sherman, in a friendly reply, thus wrote: