_Sixteenth_.--The possession of arms or other dangerous weapons without authority should be punished by fine or imprisonment and the arms forfeited. _Seventeenth_.--No one, white or colored, with or without passes, should have authority to go into a quarter without permission of the proprietor of said quarter. Should any insist upon going in, or be found in a quarter without permission of the proprietor, he should be arrested at once by the proprietor. _Eighteenth_.--Fighting and quarrelling should be prohibited under severe penalties, especially husbands whipping their wives. _Nineteenth_.--Laborers and all other persons domesticated on plantations or elsewhere should be required to be respectful in tone, manner, and language to their employers, and proprietors of the plantations or places on which they reside, or be fined and imprisoned. _Twentieth_.--The whole study, aim, and object of the negro laborer now is how to avoid work and yet have a claim for wages, rations, clothes, &c. No. 31. OAK FOREST, NEAR TIGERVILLE STATION, _N.O. and O. Railroad, December_ 1, 1864. Dear Sir: The earnest desire you have manifested to make the negro laborer under the new order of things successful, makes me the more disposed to offer every assistance in my power to that end. I have no prejudices to overcome; I would do the blacks all the good in my power consistently with their welfare and the welfare of the country; I owe them no ill will, but I am well satisfied that it will demand the highest skill and the largest experience combined to make the new system work successfully, when hitherto all others, including our own two years' experience, have signally failed. No namby-pamby measures will do. We may have more psalm singing, more night preaching, greater excesses in the outward manifestation of religion, but depend upon it there will be less true morality, less order, less truthfulness, less honest industry. It is not the experiment of a few only, or of a day, but of an _institution_, if anything, for millions; the mixing in industrial association of separate races hitherto distinct; of systems fundamentally changed and not of mere individuals, and the man who does not rise to the height of the great argument fails before he starts. It is not to listen to babblers, to _professional_ philanthropists, to quacks and demagogues: it demands a manly, masculine, vigorous exercise of executive power, adapted to the circumstances of the case. Nobody is absolutely free, white or black. I have been a slave all my life; you have been the same. We were subject to discipline from childhood, and the negro as well, and must continue to be subject to wholesome restraints all of us.