"I have often encountered this class. I saw many of them last year, while visiting, as member of a Government commission, some of the Southern States. Labor degraded before their eyes has extinguished within them all respect for industry, all ambition, all honorable exertion to improve their condition. When last I had the pleasure of seeing you at Nashville, I met there, in the office of a gentleman charged with the duty of issuing transportation and rations to indigent persons, black and white, a notable example of this strange class. He was a Rebel deserter,--a rough, dirty, uncouth specimen of humanity,--tall, stout, and wiry-looking, rude and abrupt in speech and bearing, and clothed in tattered homespun. In no civil tone, he demanded rations. When informed that all rations applicable to such a purpose were exhausted, he broke forth,-- "What am I to do, then? How am I to get home?' "'You can have no difficulty,' was the reply. 'It is but fifteen or eighteen hours down the river' (the Cumberland) 'by steamboat to where you live. I furnished you transportation; you can work your way.' "'Work my way!' (with a scowl of angry contempt.) 'I never did a stroke of work since I was born; and I never expect to, till my dying day.' "The agent replied, quietly,-- "'They will give you all you want to eat on board, if you help them to wood.' "'Carry wood!' he retorted, with an oath. 'Whenever they ask me to carry wood, I'll tell them they may set me on shore; I'd rather starve for a week than work for an hour; I don't want to live in a world that I can't make a living out of without work.' "Is it for men like that, ignorant, illiterate, vicious, fit for no decent employment on earth except manual labor, and spurning _all_ labor as degradation,--is it in favor of such insolent swaggerers that we are to disfranchise the humble, quiet, hard-working negro? Are the votes of three such men as Stanton or Seward, Sumner or Garrison, Grant or Sherman, to be neutralized by the ballot of one such worthless; barbarian?"