The freedmen and colored people of Mobile are, as a general thing, orderly, quiet, industrious, and well dressed, with an earnest desire to learn and to fit themselves for their new status. My last report from the school commissioners of the colored schools of Mobile, made on the 28th of July, showed 986 pupils in daily attendance. They give no cause for the wholesale charges made against them of insurrection, lawlessness, and hostility against their former masters or the whites generally. On the contrary, they are perfectly docile and amenable to the laws, and their leaders and popular teachers of their own color continually counsel them to industry and effort to secure their living in an honorable way. They had collected from themselves up to the 1st of August upwards of $5,000 for their own eleemosynary institutions, and I know of many noble instances where the former slave has devoted the proceeds of his own industry to the maintenance of his former master or mistress in distress. Yet, in the face of these facts, one of the most intelligent and high-bred ladies of Mobile, having had silver plate stolen from her more than two years ago, and having, upon affidavit, secured the incarceration of two of her former slaves whom she suspected of the theft, came to me in my official capacity, and asked my order to have them whipped and tortured into a confession of the crime charged and the participants in it. This lady was surprised when I informed her that the days of the rack and the thumbscrew were passed, and, though pious, well bred, and a member of the church, thought it a hardship that a negro might not be whipped or tortured till he would confess what he _might_ know about a robbery, although not even a _prima facie_ case existed against him, or that sort of evidence that would induce a grand jury to indict. I offer this as an instance of the feeling that exists in all classes against the negro, and their inability to realize that he is a free man and entitled to the rights of citizenship. With regard to municipal law in the State of Alabama, its administration is a farce. The ministers of the law themselves are too often desperadoes and engaged in the perpetration of the very crime they are sent forth to prohibit or to punish. Without the aid of the bayonets of the United States Alabama is an anarchy. The best men of Alabama have either shed their blood in the late war, emigrated, or become wholly incapacitated by their former action from now taking part in the government of the State. The more sensible portion of the people tremble at the idea of the military force being eliminated, for, whatever may be their hatred of the United States soldier, in him they find their safety.