Mr. NIBLACK. Mr. Speaker, I will not detain the House for any length of time. As has been well solid, this is a most extraordinary measure, one which calls for at least some resistance from those who regard it as I do this or any other similar legislation. In my judgment it is unnecessary, because the present condition of the country does not require it. I can see nothing in the past judicial history of this country, or of the courts of the U.S., which calls for such legislation as this nothing which demands the censure which is; by the bill which I suppose will soon be passed by this body. Sir, the judicial branch of this Government is one to which we have all looked with pecu liar pride. In no court or system of courts has justice been administered more impartially; nowhere have the proprieties of professional and official life been more steadily observed than in the courts of the U.S. Hence it is unjust to those courts to anticipate that they intend to do anything violative of the strictest rules of official and professional eti uette. The class of lawyers who practice in those courts compare favorably with those practicing at any bar in the country, and I may say the world. This bill, however, assumes that the courts of the U.S. are about to admit to practice a class of men who are unworthy to be the associates of those who are now practicing there; and it seeks by this sort of legislation to override the independence of the judiciary, to aim a blow at the pardoning power of the President, to subvert alfo. well settled legal rules which have regulated the admission of attorneys so long as those courts and the courts after which they are modeled have had an existence. But, sir, the method of reaching the end proposed is highly objectionable, if not im: practicable. The mode in which the guilt of parties charged with offenses is to be ascertained raises a side issue, which a court cannot properly try. It is proposed to convict men of crime in a manner unknown to the law. The opinion is entertained by many high in authority in this country, and is held by a number of the gentlemen on the other side of the House, that no man who was connected with the late rebellion can be convicted of treason if he was in the army of the confederate States and recognized as a belligerent. I understood the Gentfrom Pennsylvania, [Mr. STEvens,) in an argument the other day, to admit, or rather to charge, that JeffersonDavis, the late president of the socalled confederate States, would not be convicted of treason in a civil court, for the reason that he was a bel. ligerent and is now a prisoner of war, liable to be treated only as a prisoner of war by civilized nations. If this doctrine be true, he cannot be held by a civil court to be guilty of treason; and being a prisoner of war, he may, by many means known to the usages of civilized warfare, be incorporated into the body politic and become entitled to all the rights and privileges in the courts or elsewhere of any othes citizen of the U.S. If this doctrine as to the legal liability of those who were engaged in the late rebellion be correct a question about which I express no opinion on this question, because it would not be germane to this discussion the bill would be ine perative upon the very class of men whom it confessedly seeks to exclude from practice in the Federal courts. Before we attempt to legislate further upon the question of what is treason and what is not treason, making this offense the ground of exclusion from civil or professional privileges, let us have some decision of the courts upon this question of treason, and the legal guilt of those who have been engaged in the late rebellion, according to the ordinary definitions of the term “treason.” But, sir, the great and insuperable objections I have to the proposed bill are that it is an attempted encroachment on the judicial dept of this Government; a blow at the independence of the judiciary of the U.S.; an attack on constitutional liberty itself. As one who has occupied a brief but no. judicial position, as an American citizen, as a Representative of a portion of the people of this country at least, I protest against the passage of this bill, and shii continue to protest against all such legislation. Mr. Speaker, I would like to discuss this. bill further, but I have already consumed the yery short time allotted to me, and I yield the floor.