Mr. WADE. I had not intended, Mr. president, to say anything more on this subject; nor shall I now detain the Senate longer than will enable me to reply to some of the positions which the Senfrom Vermont has assumed, placing me I think in a false position, or at a sense in which I did not intend an ich I hardly think could have been properly so understood. The Senator rather insinuated that after having been for a great many years an advocate of free and liberal principles, I have some how fallen from that position and become the advocate of other principles. I do not understand that to be my position. When slave was the question before us, when the right o men to vote was presented to us, I have always been the advocate of principles of liberty; and where the proper opportunity was presented for my action in support of them I have been I believe as unwavering in that respect as any other Senator on this floor. I do not admit that I have now less zeal on that subject than I have always had. I have never, however, been one of those who would drag those principles to an extreme so as to lose a practical opportunity of advancing great public objects on account of what I considered an abstraction, a technicality. Sometimes a thing like that may be insisted upon so as to lose, the opportunity of performing great good. When ever such occasions have arisen there may have been an apparent inconsistency on my part, but I have ji.to stand the hazard of it before the people and before my own conscience and to risk a shadow to obtain the substance. That has always been my course; I am never frightened at a red rag hung up; I do not bite at it. But show me that the principle which you say I am about to violate is really a principle and not the bare shadows of a principle, the ghost of a principle, as I think is the case here, and I am with you. Now, how stand these Territories? The Senfrom Massachusetts yesterday branded the proposition that I have been i. here as shameful and disgraceful. He repeate that assertion in the face of this Senate, almost 2/3rds of whom at the last session voted for this very measure not once, but more than once, for they repeated the vote in regard to both these Territories; and the same members, if we may judge by the votes they constantly gave yesterday, stand ready now to give the same vote, notwithstanding all the Senator's arguments, and although he has branded the proposition as shameful and disgraceful. Do gentlemen think that 4 5th s of the Republican members of this body are advo cates of absolute wrong and injustice, that they are willing to sacrifice those principles for which they have so long and so courageously con: tended under all circumstances, that they stand up here shamefully to trample them under foot today with no motive on earth to do so?.Mr. EDMUNDS. I should like to ask my friend one question: whether in his own individual and conscientious judgment he believes this provision in the constitution, which is offered to us, excluding all other than white men from political rights, to be a just and poor constitutional provision or not?