Mr. EDMUNDS. I will specify the State of Wisconsin for one, where the final act of admission, if my recollection is right, provided that the jurisdiction of the people of the U.S. over certain rivers should be held intact, and that the State of Wisconsin should never undertake to levy any tolls, dues, or other exactions upon the free navigation of those rivers. It was put in as a section by the force of the law of Congress. My honorable friendfrom NewJersey [Mr. FRELINGHUYseN] has furnished me with another illustration, and the acts of Congress are full of them in some form or other. He has handed to me the act for the admission of the State of Ohio, which declares, not as part of an ordinance to be submitted to the people of that State, but as a part of the paramount law of the land creating that State: “provided the same, ” (that is the constitution of Ohio) “shall be republican and not repugnant to the ordinance of the 18th of July, 1787, between the original States and the people and States of the territory northwest of the river Ohio.” But, Mr. President, I need not proceed to give a detailed list of the various acts of congress in which, when the final act of admission came to be passed, Congress has exerted and exercised the power, paramount and supreme, of declaring in such and such respects as it seemed fit to them the exercise of State sovereignty over a given subject should not prevail. As I said the other day, if we were in a court discussing this question as mere lawyers, I take it it would be difficult for my friendfrom Iowa, or for any other gentleman learned in the law, to maintain that the power to pass a law did not necessarily include and imply the power to o, such qualifications and conditions upon the operation of that law as to the lawmaking power should seem fit. It is a proposition which I think I can safely defy any man, however great or learned he is, to take the contrary of. That being the case, Mr. President, I am not troubled by the doubts which my learned friendfrom Iowa seems to express. I{r were, I would vote cheerfully and gladly with him, because with him I agree that there is no emergency whatever of expediency as it might be called, but it is not expediency there is no emergency whatever which will justify an American Senator in departing from the true principles of legislation to achieve any temporary object, however necessary and desirable it may be. Thus thinking, I propose to amend the amendment of the Senfrom Missouri now pending, by striking it all out and substituting for it this: Abife:, That this act shall take effect with the fundamental and perpetual condition that within said State of Nebraska there shall be no abridgment or denial of the exercise of the elective franchise, or of any other right to any person by reason of raceor color, excepting Indians not taxed.