Wherever I go--the street, the shop, the house, the hotel, or the steamboat--I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the negro as possessing any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors will cheat a negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a negro they do not deem murder; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a negro they do not consider robbery. The people boast that when they get freedmen affairs in their own hands, to use their own classic expression, "the niggers will catch hell." The reason of all this is simple and manifest. The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and however much they may admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and by the President's emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves they treat the colored people just as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate. Justice from tribunals made up among such people is impossible. Here and there is a fair and just man. One in a hundred, perhaps, sees the good policy of justice; but these are so few that they will not, at present, guide public sentiment. Other States may, in this matter, be in advance of Mississippi; I suspect they are. If justice is possible, I feel sure they are. I fear such tribunals would be very expensive for the poor freedmen. Fees are heavy in this State. Unless they can get justice inexpensively, we might as well deny them all remedy before courts at once. Indeed, I think that would be rather more merciful than the arrangement proposed, as they would then trust nobody, and would be less defrauded. Long delays in the course of procedure would be ruinous to most of them. How could a freedman appeal a suit for wages, or respond adequately to an appeal, when he is starving for want of the very wages which are withheld from him? It may be claimed that officers of the bureau can watch such cases and see that justice is done the freedman. I say they cannot do it. Political power is against him, and will destroy any officer who fearlessly does his duty in this way. He will be charged with interference with the civil authority, with violating some constitution or some code; his acts will be so twisted and contorted before they reach Washington, that he will get nothing for his pains but censure and dismissal.