These three suggestions are enough to determine a general policy which shall give us, in all instances, the immediate use of our victories. Let us enlist all the able-bodied men we can from the negroes. Let us establish the rest as near their old homes as we can,--not in poor-houses or phalansteries, but on their own farms. Let us appoint for each proper district a small staff of officers sufficient to see that their rights are respected by their neighbors, and that they have means to defend themselves against reckless or unorganized aggression. There seems to be no need of sending them as fugitives to our rear. There seems to be no need of leaving the country we pass a desert. There seems to be no need of waiting a year or two before we find for them their places. God has found for them their places. Let them stay where they were born. We have made them freemen. Let them understand that they must maintain their freedom. More simply stated, such a policy amounts merely to this: "Treat them as you would treat white people." "What would you do with the blacks?" said a Commission of Inquiry to an intelligent jurist who had made some very brilliant decisions at New Orleans. "I would not do anything with them," was his very happy and suggestive reply. He would let them alone. If we could free ourselves of the notion that we must huddle them together, or that we must carry them to some strange land,--in short, that they have no rights of home and fireside,--we should find that we had a much smaller problem to deal with. Keep them where you find them, unless they will go on and fight with you. Whether they go or stay, let them understand that they are your friends and you are theirs, and that they must defend themselves, if they expect you to defend them. The education and the civilization will follow. "The church and the school," as John Adams says, "belong with the town and the militia." The statistics of General Butler's department begin to show that a larger proportion of blacks are at school there than of whites. As we write these words, we receive General Banks's Order No. 38, issued March 22, providing for a board of education, and a tax upon property to establish schools for black and for white children. We have no fears that such results will be slow, if the enfranchised peasantry, one million or four million, have the right to work on their own land, or to accept the highest wage that offers,--if they find they are not arbitrarily removed from their old homes,--and if the protection of those homes is, in the first instance, intrusted to themselves.