The President, so history must write it, approached the great question slowly and reluctantly; and in February, 1862, he little dreamed of the proclamations he was to issue in the September and January following. Perhaps that slowness and reluctance were well, for thereby it was given to this people to work out their own salvation, rather than to be saved by any chief or prophet. Notwithstanding the plan of superintendents was accepted, there were no funds wherewith to pay them. At this stage the "Educational Commission," organized in Boston on the 7th of February, and the "Freedmen's Relief Association," organized in New York on the 20th of the same month, gallantly volunteered to pay both superintendents and teachers, and did so until July 1st, when the Government, having derived a fund from the sale of confiscated cotton left in the territory by the Rebels, undertook the payment of the superintendents, the two societies, together with another organized in Philadelphia on the 3d of March, and called the "Port Royal Relief Committee," providing for the support of the teachers. When these voluntary associations sprang into being to save an enterprise which otherwise must have failed, no authoritative assurance had been given as to the legal condition of the negroes. The Secretary, in a letter to the agent, had said, that, after being received into our service, they could not, without great injustice, be restored to their masters, and should therefore be fitted to become self-supporting citizens. The President was reported to have said freely, in private, that negroes who were within our lines, and had been employed by the Government, should be protected in their freedom. No official assurance of this had, however, been given; and its absence disturbed the societies in their formation. At one meeting of the Boston society action was temporarily arrested by the expression of an opinion by a gentleman present, that there was no evidence showing that these people, when educated, would not be the victims of some unhappy compromise. A public meeting in Providence, for their relief, is said to have broken up without action, because of a speech from a furloughed officer of a regiment stationed at Port Royal, who considered such a result the probable one. But the societies, on reflection, wisely determined to do what they could to prepare them to become self-supporting citizens, in the belief, that, when they had become such, no Government could ever be found base enough to turn its back upon them. These associations, it should be stated, have been managed by persons of much consideration in their respective communities, of unostentatious philanthropy, but of energetic and practical benevolence, hardly one of whom has ever filled or been a candidate for a political office.