Mr. WILLIAMS. Mr. Speaker, nearly 2 years ago, and while the war was flagrant, felt it my duty as a member of this body to look into the question of the relations that had been produced by it, the privileges that had been liirfeited on the one hand, and the rights and powers that had been acquired on the other, witha view to the readjustment of the whole machine by the restoration of those parts that had been sundered fromit by the disturbance. With some, the infirm offaith, the inquirywas thought to be premature. This, however, was not the judgment of the last Congress. It passed a bill which did not meet the approval of the Executive because it interfered with a plan of his own that had not proved acceptable to it, and the (pliestion was adjourned without advice from that body, and in such a way as to leave the field open for experiments with which it was not in a condition to interfere. The people are here again in the persons of their representatives who are the lawmaking power of the nation, not on invitation but by constitutional mandate, toinquire what has been attempted, and to decide for themselves what shall be done with the Territories that have been conquered by their arms. It is agreed on all han s that they shall be eventually readmitted as members of the common family. It is not pretended by anybody that they can resume their places here of their own more volition and without any consent ofours. It is not insisted, I think, by any wellread statesman, that our power to exclude depends only on our right to determine upon the qualifications of our own members. this confessed that there is an organic lesion that forbids their return, and can only be supplied by a new organization which no act of spontaneous generation can produce. It will scarcely be contended now, I suppose, as it was by an eccentric committee of the last House, that our victory was crowned only with a lapse of sovereignty, or that the jurisdiction to restore a lost member is anywhere but here. I shall be excused, of course, for returning to this subject under circumstances that not only invite but compel its discussion. If it was not proper for Congress to prescribe in advance the law that was to govern this question in the last resort, at all events, while other agencies, mistaking perhaps its backwardness for an abdication of its rightful powers, were industriously employed in forestalling its own action, it is no longer possible, in view of what has occurred since the last adjournment, and of the forces thathave been mustered to overhear our delib erations here, to avoid a conflict that has been so long foreshadowed. To determine this great question, the greatest by far that has ever cha longed the deliberations of an American Congress, it is important to inquire, in the 1st place, whatis the osture of these Territoriesas it has been alTectet by the progress and results of the war, which has just cen determined by their enforced submission to the authority of the nation? So far at least, as armed resistance is concerned, it may be assumed that the waris at an end. The deluded communities that have so wantonly insulted this Government and defied its power now lie conquered, and helpless, and in social ruin at our feet, deprived, by their own actIwill not say, in the language of the proclamations that have been addressed to them, of “all civil government whatever, ” but certainly of all the organism that was essential to the maintenance of their old relations to the Union. To claim any more than this would be to as sume a condition of anarchy where there is still a “ supreme law” under the constitution, and where, even in the absence of such a rule, the territory reclaimed must necessarily pass under the jurisdiction and law of the conqueror. Taking it, however, to be true, as stated, then, by necessar inference, the civil law of the Union is det roned, and its military power is all th;. remains to hold these States in subjection to our authority. In point of fact, we do so hold them now, except so far as they have been surrendered to the enemy, without other law than our own sovereign will. The en reme executive functionary of this nation, who, by virtue of his oflfice, is the CommanderinChief of its armies, feeling that they were not in a condition to be trusted to themselves, instead of sheathing the sword, convoking the representatives of the peeple, advising them that these provinces were tranquillized, and submit ting to them, as the lawmaking power, the grave question, what is to be done with them? has preferred to await the usual period of our assembl. e, and appointed his lieutenants and procensu s to govern them in the meanwhile with the aid o armies, and the terrors of that arbitrary code which is known by the name of martial law. We are here now, however, and it becomes our 1st duty to relieve that officer from this unusual and inappropriate task, and to furnish some security to the conquered people by the substitution of another and a gentler rule. I would not be understood, however, as questioning the exercise of a sovereignty like this, so long as it was necessitated by the absence of a legislaive power, since that is but a logical consequence of the position previously maintained by me on this floor, that these States had ceased to be members of the Union, and passed into the condition of Territories. If they continued to be States, within the meaning of the constitution, the moment the resistance ceased it would have been the duty of the Executive to withdraw the armies, and they would have at once resumed their status quo ante, with all their constitutional rights and privileges unimpaired. If they were still States, all that has been done since, even though the power of Congress had been invoked to authorize it, would have been the clearest ofusurpations. Taking them, however, to have been “deprived, ” in the language of the proclamations, “of all civil government whatever, ” it. was but a legitimate inference of the Executive that they had not only forfeited their elective franchise, and lost their proierty in slaves, but placed themselves in a condition where they were no longer entitled even to the benefit of the constitutional guarantee without a new birth. The idea of any State, except that of nature, without any “ civil goverument whatever, ” is as incompreheusible to me as that of a State being in the Union, or indeed any where, that is admitted to have no existence whatever. Nomore would I be inclined to quarrel with those who, starting from these premises, are still disposed to insist that these States were never out. The difference is perhaps only the result of awant of recison in the use of terms, or a diversity of opinion in regard to their meaning. Mr. Burke has furnished us with a distinction here that meets the case precisely.” The word State, ” he remarks in his letter to Sir Herculcs Langrishe, on the subject of the extension o“f the elective franchise to the Irish Catholics, is one of much ambiguity. Sometimes it is used to signify the whole commonwealth, comprehending all its orders, with the several)riv ileges belongin to each. Sometimes it s1gni fies only the big or, and ruling part of the commonwealth, which is commonl called the government.” In the former of these senses. it is not to be doubted that these communities still exist, and are in the Union, or of the Union, because their territories belong to it, and their people owe it allegiance. In the latter, howeverand that is the one that connects them with our political system, as the roclamations concedethey are admitted by tosame proclamations to have been destroyed, and can, of course, be nowhere and this will be found to reconcile the aparent contradiction between the language of the roclamatios and the accordunt practice of the Government on the one hand, and the theory of those who are supposed to speak its opinions, and infer from some unhappphrascology of the former, as well as from temore recent utterances of the message, the repugnant idea that there was a constitution of government left existing amid the general wreck, in a case where it had been previously declared in terms that there was no civil government whatever.” There can be no real dispute, therefore, between the Executive and his northern friends as to the posture of these dilapidated members. Their entire treatment by him shows that they have only been regarded practically as conquered provinces. I derecate, however, the encouragement that has cen given to the cue mies of the Government by the promulgation of the fallacious doctrine which has found so ready a currency among the disaffected of the North, and has proved so welcome to the unrepentant rebels of) the South, that these disorganized States have never ceasedto be members of the Federal Union. That is the present theory of every traitor, North or South, who has been in sisting for 4 long years of war on the right as well as the fact of secession. With strong as surances of pardon, they can well afford to risk the consequences of treason by repudiating the belligerency upon which they have heretofore claimed immunity for their crime, if it will restore them to their Original rights, and serve them as an argument against the legality of the proclamation that has strip edthem of their property in slaves. Grant there the postulate that all their acts of secession were not a fact, but a nullitythat the crime which they committed was impossible, because it was forbid denand if they cannot invalidate the war and the debt that was made by it, they will at least stavger your courts with the question, by what authority under the constitution you have presumed to deprive the people of a State Within the Union, by reclamation and without judgment of law, o any of their franchises or property. they will admit it now asan incident of the warithere was a war, or could be where there was no secession, and therefore no belligerentso far as the thing was consummated by an actual seizure, just as they are now readyto confess that the right of secession has been disproved bv the logic of the sword, which means only by their present inability to maintain it by that argument, while their northern brethren still assert the very heres upon which it rests. But once in, they will take you at your word, and insist that all your intermediate acts were nullities as well as theirs. Agreein, however, as we all do, that these States, without any local law or governments of their own, have passed under the law of the conquerorand the attempt to reorganize them by federal authority is an admission ofitthe next question, into tediscussion of which we are now prematurely hurried, is not how they are to be governed until they shall be in a condition to returnbecause that seems to have been assumed to be no business of oursbut whether that condition has been reached, and what are to he the agencies and terms through and upon which this consummation is to be effected. If there be anyone question that more than another falls within the exclusive comizanee of the people of the loyal States, and reserves and demands the thoughtful consideration of their Representatives, it is just this. 11 of the columnar supports of our political edifice are now lying around us, like the giant columns 1866. 785 A of Tadmor and Palmyra, with shaft and capital and architrave alike shattered by the mighty convulsion that has laid them all in ruins. Where is the hand that is to lift these columns to their place? Who is it that shall reunite the dissevered fragments, and wreathe the ivy over the towers that have been rent from turret to foundation? What are to be the process and the conditions on which these great criminals, who, “like the base Judean, ” have wantonly flung away “ a pearl richer than all theirtribe, ” are to be readmitted into the enjoyment of the privileges theyhave rejected and ties ised, and received again into the fellowship of) the men they hated, and the confidence and honors of the GOvernment they have only failed to destroy because it has proved too strong even for a degree of treachery that has no parallel in history? How far are these bafiled parricides to be trusted again, now that they are vanquished, and without power of resistance, after such an experience, after so bloody a lesson as they have taught us, and what are the guards that will be required to prevent a recurrence of any of the evils from which we have just escaped? All these are problems which, however simple they may have been considered in some quarters, might well embarrass the profoundest of our statesmen, and which all the collective wisdom of the nation will not be more than sufficient to solve. The war itself, stupendous as it has proved, was nothing in the comparison. There never wasa reasonable doubt as to the suppression of the rebellion, provided the loyal States should prove true to themselves. It was a purely arithmetical problem, of which the elements were within thereach of every body. If all the slave States had been united, 18 millions of northern free men, with the credit and resources and prestige of this great Government on their side, and man for man the peers of their enemy, Were sure to subdue less than 1/2 their number, with 4 millions of a disaffected population in their midst, as soon as they were allowed to strike at the heart of the rebellion, and it came to be under stood that it was to be a war (2 l outrance. The only real danger was in the prospective and inevitable precess of reconstruction. It was a question only whether there would be wisdom enough in the councils of the nation to refit by the heroism of our soldiers in the fie d, or folly enough to throw away the fruits of the many sacrifices that this long and bloody war had cost us, by ignoring our past experience, and rushing with headlong preci itation and immature resolve into measures o restoration, resting on no system or principle and reserving no uarantees for the Future. hVe have just reache that point. The rebellion, so far, at all events, as armed resistance is concerned, is over. We still tread, however, on the ashes of an unextinguislied volcano“supposito cimre doloso.” “Au earthquakes spoils are sepul chered below.” The ground still heaves and trembles; the fiery flood still surges and pulsates beneath our feet; and already, almost before the thunders of our artillery have rolled into the distance, and while the smoke of battle is still upon the plainwithou amoments dose to survey the wide field of ruin, and reac i for ward, ifpossible, with telescopic vision into all the bearings and all the remotest possible consequences of the act which we are called upon to do, a childish impatience is urging us upon a path where angels might fear to tread, and expecting us to crowd the structure of an empirethe ordinary work of centuriesinto the deliberations of an hour. Upon considerations such as these I would have preferred to wait until the 2 Houses, acting in their legislative capacities, and in the spirit of statesmen who are charged with the interests of half a continent, had matured some plan which would secure uniformity in our proceedings here, while it furnished to the whole countryto the loyal people of the returning States as well as to ourselvesall the safeguards which the circumstances of the case required. My judgment is that you can proceed lawfully in no other way. If restoration is the object; if these State governments have been destroyed a d must be organized anew; if the people of these States must, be enabled to restore them to their old relations and put them in a way to entitle them to claim the benefits of the constitutional guarantee through the agenc of the Federalauthorities; iftheymustbe rea mitted; if the guarantee is to be fulfilledall which things are conceded by the roclamationstheu it is as clear as sunlight that nothing short of an act of Congress, a law in all its constitutional forms, can accomplish this work. Butlam in no hurry even as to this. Fesiina lento is the motto forastatesman. States areof slow growth. A century is but a day in the life of a nation. A great poet has said “1,000yearsscarceserveto form a State: An hour may lay it in the dust.” To heal the wounds inflicted by a 4 years civilWar is not the work of a day. If we would do it well we must imitate the processes of nature, beginning at the bottom and working slowly to the surface. Sound statesmanship would declare in favor of this course in any case. It would tolerate noother where there is solittle excuse for precipitancy, where there is no real pressure except that which is invited by our selves, and where a mistake once made. however disastrous in its effects, would be absolutely irremediable. Thatprivilege is, however, denied to us. Though we had declined to court this issue by going out to meet it, it has come to seek us here, and ifwe have not been allowed to provide by law, in advance of the occasion, a rule which shall govern all cases, we must at least meet it in the more questionable shape in which it presents itself, thougih under disadvantages not unlike those we ha to encounter with the same parties at the beginning of the war. The present Executive of the nation, acting upon the prevalent idea that it is the duty of the Government to take the initiative step in the process of restoration. instead of awaiting any spontaneous action or the expression of any desire on the part of the people of the rebel States to return to their original relations in the Unionwhich could be only properly conveyed by an appeal to Congresshas, in the recess of this body, and on the cessation of active hostilities in these States, concluded it to be his duty to direct their organization, along with the process by which it is to be effected, in order to entitle them to the benefit of the constitutional guarantee, and has accordingly indicated his plan in a series of proclamations, which are all of the like tenor, though differing in some respects from the plan ofhis predecessor. The presumption was that they would in all in stances conform to the law that he had prescribed for them. Having so complied, they would naturally expect that their immediate lawgiver, although then understood to admit the ultimate decision to rest with Congress alone, would recommend their admission, and enforce that recommendation with all the influence that he could lawfully exert. It becomes important, therefore, to look into that process, and ascertain whether it was consistent with the spirit of our institutions; whether it rested on any correct view of the relations with which it had to deal; and how far it was calculated to secure the object for which it was professedly contrived. These proclamations all recite and rest upon the constitutional obligation to guaranty to all these States a RFG. They do not declare the war to be at an end, but the contrary. They speak in the name and by the authority of the Commanderin Chief, as well as the supreme civil executive magistrateof the U.S. They assert that the rebellion has “in its revolutionary pro ress deprived the people of these States of all civil government whatever ” and for the purpose of enabling the loyal people thereof to organize State governments, by virtue as well of the military as of the civil power vested in the Executive, commission sundry individuals as provisional governors for the occasion, with power to prescribe rules for the assemblage at the earliest practicable period of conventions of delegate; to be chosen by that part of the people which is loyal, for the purpose of ultering and amending the constitutions thereof, and with authority, moreover, to exercise all the power necessary to enable such loyal peo10 to restore said States to their constitutions relations with the Federal Government, and to present such forms of government as will entitle them to the guarantee of the U.S., and their people therefore to protection against in vasion, insurrection, and domestic violence with the proviso, however, that no person shall vote, or be eligible as a member, without having previouslytaken an oath to support the constitution and Union of the U.S., and all the laws and proclamations made during the rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves, and without having been duly qualified as an elector by the constitutions and laws of these States in force before the adoption of the socalled ordinances of secession and they further enjoin upon the military commanders of the particular Depts, and all officers or persons in the military and naval service, the duty of aiding and assisting the said provisional governors in carrying these proclamations into effect. A careful analysis of these instruments will be found to result in the development of the following leading propositions: 1. The admit the continuing existence of a state o war, and profess to rest on the 2 fold authoritv of the President as Commander inChief of the Army and Navy of the U.S., as well as supreme civil executive magis trate of the Union. 2. They declare the people of these States to have been deprived by their own acts of all civil government whatever. 8. hey confess the necessity of a new organization for the purpose of restorin their constitutional relations with the Fedora Government, and presenting such form of government as will entitle them to the benefit of its guarantees, and therein admit that they are not so entitled in their present condition. 4. They concede that the new organization must receive its impulse and direction from without, and be assisted by the cooperative action of the Federal authorities. 6. Confessing, however, that these States are not now entitled to the benefit of the constitutional guarantee, theyassert, in effect, that under it the Federal Government is bound to place them in a position which will enable them to claim it, and assume that the fulfillment of that guarantee is a purely executive function, to be perfOrined in such a way as the judgment of the President may determine. 6. They direct, accordingly, the assemblage of conventions at the earliest practicable day, and define and ascertain the qualifications of the voters. 7. In fixing these qualifications they adopt a standard that is entirely new, by limiting the franchise, not to the white men generally, but to such only of the people who were invested with that prerogative under the government that is admitted to have been destroyed as are loyal, and will swear to support, not the constitution only, but all laws and roclamations during the rebellion having reerence to the emancipation of slaves. 8. Admitting, moreover, that these States are without any civil government whatever, and that they must necessarily organize anew they insist that it shall be done upon the partial recognition of a government that has been destroved, by a process, not of organization at all, but of amendment and alteration only, that shall work simply on that part of the defunct corpus which was left untouched by the ordinances of secession, and whose continued existence would involve a denial of the right of Federal interference, and is in direct contradiction of the premises on which these proclamations rest. 9. They look, moreover, to the employment of the military arm in the execution and en. forcement of the scheme of restoration which they involve. With all proper respect for the Executive, I am constraiue to say that there are evidences here, either that these proclamations could not have been considered or digested with the care which so great an occasion would seem to have demanded, or that the case might not unprofitabl y have been transferred from the other end of the avenue to its appropriate forum in the fire at couucil of the nation, assembled here to eliberate upon its interests, and vested exclusively with the high power of legislating in regard to its territories, of admittin new States, and of fulfilling all constitution a guarantees. My reasons for so thinking will, however, be better understood from the remarks I have to offer on the several propositions which I have extracted from them. i It may be safely affirmed, I think, that the existence of a state of war, whetherthatwar be openly aggressive and demonstrative in its character, or exhibiting itself only in sullen discon tentor disatfection or hatred of the Government, such as to necessitate the presence of anlilitary force to compel obedience to the national authority or to prevent a seizure of the local power is utter y irreconcilable with the idea of such an organization as the genius of our institutions an the very texture of our Government would demand. Without the s cutaneous and unrestrained volition of the mayority of the people, I cannot conceive theidea of the existence or constitution of a republican State. A form of government erecte by or for a minority of the people, and dependm upon armies for its existence or support, would be the merest mockery of a republic, and could not be recognized here consistently with the terms of the constitutional guarantee It is a selfevident proposition that so long as it requires an army or a Federal legatewhether called by the name of provisional governor, lieutenant, commandant, proconsul, or pretorian prefectto govern it, it is not in a condition to perform that task itself; and the very appointment, which would be otherwise unlawful, 18a confession of it. While the Executive holds the Territory within his grasp as the CommanderinChief of our armies, he holds it under military law which is the only law he can administerand by a power that is absolute; and it is idle to talk about the restoration of the civil authority by the voluntary act of the people themselves, because he is essentially supreme. The power he wields is above the law, and silences the law. There can be no 2 codes, no divided imperium here. The man who so rules is essentially adictator; and it makes no difference in principle whether he prescribes the law for a good purpose or a bad one. It is impossible that the people should act freely under such a domination. It is only when it ceasesthat they can truly be regarded as their own masters. The jealousy of our fathers has guarded against the very presence of the military on the election ground, even where the civi law reigned, and the subordination of the military was unquestioned. Where it knows no law, however except its own will, and stands by to directand execute that will, the acts done, which would be clearly invalidated thereby in the States, are its own. If it assembles conventionsand names the voters, they are its creatures. If it elects Congressmen, they represent it only. If the product of its imperial rescrit is a republic in form, it is a republic engendered from the decomposin remains of the dead sovereignty, under the nameembrace of the military weh by republic hatched into life by the spirit of des notism brooding over a chaos of rum. To say that a monstrous birth like this, tearin itsway through the entrails of the Statea delivery by the swprdassisted by the matronly offices of a provisional governor, and seed by a more than royal attendance in the high functionaries of State, “the military commandant of the dept, and all o cers, and persogs in the military and naval servicc, ” who are expressly summoned to be present on the august occasionis thelewitimate offspring of a free people, or has any of the features ofarepublic within a meaning of the constitution, is to draw largely on the imagination. Freedom recoils aghast at such an up arition, and shricks out “death ! l, Nor will it be sufficient to assert that these swordbearers were not actually present in the body, and that therefore no control was exercised over these provincial councils by their creator and lawgiver. We know that when the flat went forth publicly to the hesitating synod of NCarolina that the debt of the rebellion must be reudiated, every knee went down in humble submission to the orders of the CommanderiuChief. We know, too, from the very recent message of the rebel general and Governor of Misrlissippi, Humphreysuwho was pardoned speciall to qualify him for the place, that it was “under the ressure of federal bayonets” that the people “ of that State have abolished the institution of slavery;” and it is not uncharitable to infer that the members of all these bodies knew precisely how much would be expected of them, and were prepared to do the Will of the Executive, even though it had extended to suffrage for the black man. Disguise it as we may, these socalled constitutions of government are but articles of capitulation alter the fact; treaties between that Officer, dealing with these questions as an absolute sovereign, and the chiefs of the rebellion; terms dictated by the President ass. cbn ueror, in accordance with his own individual an imperial will; agreements reluctantly conceded by them, as the condition not only of pardon, but of restoration to power, but most invariably repudiated by their followers in the refusal to ratify them by sending monihere who were qualified under the laws of Congress to take their places amongst us. That the are so considered, even by themselves, is shown by the recent correspondence between the high contracting powers, represented by our Minister of Foreign Relations on the one hand and Govornor Orr of SCarolina on the other, in which it is declared by the latter that the State convention, which he admits to be a revolutionary body, had been dissolved “after having done all that the President requested to be done.” It is shown, too, more strongly in the letter of the rebel General Hampton to the people of SCarolina, declining to be a can idate for Governor, on the ground that it might embarrass the Executive in his benevo lent designs in favor of the South. Though not approving all that was conceded by the convention, e recommends their acquiescence in what he treats as the demands of the conqueror, on the ground of necessity, and for the special reason that the President “ had exhibited a stron disposition notonly to protect the South from the radicalism of the north, but to reinstate them in their civil and political rights.” “It may be assumed, ” he adds, ” that when the forms of government are restored, and freedom of speech allowed to us, your late convention will be subjected to harsh criticism, and its action impugned. Should such unhappily be the case, remember that you, the people of SCarolina, accepted the convention as part and parcel of the terms of your surrender. The President had no shadow of authority I admit, under the constitution of the U.S. to order a convention in this or any other State; but as a conqueror he had the right to offer, if not to dictate, terms. The terms offered by him you have accepted. I do not myself fully concur in all the measures adopted by the convention, but I shall cheerfully acquiesce in the action it took to carry out faithfully the terms agreed on. Entertaining these views, I think it our duty to sustain the POTUS so long as he manifests a disposition to restore all our rights asa sovereign State. Above all, let us stand by our State. Her record is honorable, her escutcheon untamished.” When a man like Hampton speaks of “ the radicalism of the North, ” we know that he intends the Union party of the free States, who favored the prosecution of the war and elected the President imself, and the men whom they have sent here to declare their will; and it is on the disosition of the President to protect them from is own friends jg the country and in these Halls the feeling that they could make a better bargain with him, and were safer in his hands than in those of the pee lo and their Congress, that without one war in favor of the Union, but with an earnest invocation to the people to stand, above all things, by their own onorable and untarnished State, he urges them to support, not the Union, but the President, and imponly “so long as he manifests a disposition to restore all their rights as a sovereign State, ” including, of course, the transcendent and in alienable right of secession and the Executive respon s to this presentation. of the case by informing us in his late message that we have nothing to do with the terms of settlement, while the Gentfrom NewYork, [Mr. Rsvuoxnd who is supposed to reflect his opinions, is candid enough to put his vindication of. the special requirements of that functionary on the same grounds, and in language almost iden tical with that of the traitor Hampton. It is a waste oftime, however, to labora point like this. If the orders of the Commanding General, as enunciated through the proclamations themselves were in point of fact obeyed, it is sufficient for the purposes of this argument. To deny his control over the creatures of his own will, because his subordinates did not stand over their deliberations with a drawn sword would be the merest of subterfuges. As well might it be said that the Maker of all things, who launched the circumambient orbs through the immensity of space, and prescribed the law of gravitation for their government, was exercising no control, because He was not on slee less watch at the center of the system, and teq e raphing his special orders to Neptune and ranus by way of keeping them on the track as the sped their unerring way through the mazy fabyrinth of the stellar worlds. It will be urged, however, as it has been, that this was a measure of peace; an instrumentality essential to the tranquillization of those States; a art of the process for the restoration of order that must precede the withdrawal of the national authority and would enable the loyal people there to dispense with the further presence of its armies. The answer is, that if it was intended to place the reins in the hands of the loyal minority ofwhite men, while it confesses a condition of things where a republic is impracticable and an election would be an absurdity, it could insure no peace and no permanent ascendency to that element without continued protection, because it required a military powertoinaugurateit, justasis now admitted by Governor Brovmlow to be the case in Tennessee; and if it was intended merely to restore the disloyal majority who governed before the rebellion and hurried these States into it, then it was unnecessary. The idea is, in plain English, if not to make them our masters, at least to free them from our authority in the 1st place, in the hope that it will secure peace and submission in the future. I cannot consent to any such arrangement. I do not comprehend the value of that tranquillity which is only to be purchased by the abdication of our power. whether it be by the withdrawal of our troops, the restoration to the enemy of the arms that he was compelled to lay down on the last of his battlefields, or the invitationl should rather say command to him to share our counsels in the adjustment of the results and the responsi bilities of the war. If this be peace, it might have been secured at any time, with only the waiver of our right to insist that they sha l sit down on the judgment seat and divide the empire with us. It may be secured now by allowing them to resume their power and places here upon the cheap consideration of a temporary acknowledgment that the negro is no longer an articleof merchandise, because all their chances of success in this rebellion now depend on a change of weapons and the retransfer of the theater of war to the arena where it. began. I say in this rebellion. because I am not sanguine enough to considerit at an end, as a very recent opinion of the AttyGen transmitted by the President, admits it is not. There are those, 1 know, who cannot comprehend a state of war 1866. unless it comes home to their grosser senses in the rude shock of battalions and the groans of the wounded and the dying, and think, therefore, when the standard drops from the nerve less graslp, that this is peace. It is to form a very may equate conception of a kind of arbitrament that depends as much on skillful tactics as on hard knocks. Resistance does notalways cease when its arms are stricken from its hands. The victory is not always to the strong. it is as often the uerdon to the wise. True, we have conquere these people in battle, but what of that? No man was ever converted from an enemy into a friend by the summary logic of shot and shell. “Who overcomes By force, hath overcomebut half his fee.” The demoniac spirit that animated this rebellion, the same that mutilated and starved and butchered our martyred heroes, that ine culated the veins and rotted 05 the strong arm of the northern warrior with the deadly venom of the lazarhouse, that baled the yellow fever as mer chandise for this capital, and that ended by assassinating our President, still lives. unre pentant, unsubdued, ferocious, and devilish as ever. The battle still rages, as it did in these Halls long before the outbreak of the rebellion, but under a new phase.” What though the field be lost 7 Allis not lost.” If arms have failed, there are other weapons, rejected by the South in its blind and unrea soning arrogance, which have proved in other times more potent in its hands than the puny sword that has just been shattered like a ot sherd in its collision with the iron muscle of the sinewy laboring man of the free States. Abloody experience has taught them their mistake in crossing swords with the soldiers of the North instead of fighting the battle in the Union, and relying on the folly of its statesmen and the superior address that harnessed its fierce democ racy to their triumphal car and made them the masters of the nation until the period of their revolt. Hurled to the earth like theirgreat prototypes in crime, how natural to find the ke consolation in the reflection: “Honeeforth their might we know, own; and know our So as not either to provoke or drcud New war provoked: our better part remains To work in closedesign, by fraud or trails, What force effectednot.” But this is not the peace that we have been endeavoring to secure. This is not victory, but defeatjust such defeat as that which follows the astounding paradox that our supposed triumph on the Appomattox, that made every heart leap with joy, has only urged the guilt of our enemies and reinstate them here with no right impaired, to “heard as in our hall” and “push us from our stools.” There is nothing, therefore. in the argument to drive us into such an inversion of the natural and logical order as would be involved in the impositionof State governments by the military arm, any more than there is to hurry us into a remature and illadjusted scheme of restoration, when there is abundant leisure to arrange our plans, and a false step would be irrevocable. want a real peace before reorganization and readmission here. Invert the order, and we shall have no peace. It will only amount, as I have before hinted, to a change of weapons, and a retransfer of the seat of war to these Chambers, whence they went out 4 ears ago to try the bloody issue that has been eter mined against them, just as they had before gone out in couples to seek the blood of some northern Representative and now, as to the admission that the people of the seceding States have been deprivedJ of all civil government whatever. During the last Congress, as I have already remarke, I took some pains to show that these States were, by construction of law as well as in point of fact, outside of the Union, because it was apparent that the whole question of our power to deal with them in such a way as to realize the legitimate results of the war and exact the necessary securities for our future peace, must depend on the relation in which the war had left them. The phraseology, though sufficiently precise, was not perhaps as well chosen as it might have been to exclude the idea either that they were out rightfully as States, or out in point. of fact territorially. The “rarinames, ” the few citizens of those States who, though outlawed by the belligerent relation recognized by our courts, as well as by the whole conduct of the war, and positively established by our legislation here, still remained “faithful among the faithless” would naturally protest againsta form ofexpression that seemed to shut them out from the relation of citizens, and to give them the character of alien enemies; and it is perhaps, therefore, no great matter of surprise that the doctrine should have found so little favor in high places. I do not care to reargue that question now, because it is perhaps not material. Taking the word State as contradistinguished from that of Government for which there is unquestionably an example and a warrant in the language of the constitutional clause of guarantee to mean, as it has been defined by so great an authority as Mr. Burke, “the commonwealth at large, with all its orders and all the rights belonging to each, ” and not “the ruling or governing power, ” it may be admitted without damage to the arment that they are still in. In that as ect of the case it must signify the territory, ort c people, whether black or white, loyal or disloyal, or both. It cannot be the territory only, because it would then continue to be a State, although deprived of its inhabitants as well as of its government, in which case it was never pretended that it was out. It cannot mean the peopleonly, because that would make them a te, though all disclaiming their allegiance, or all alien enemies, and owing none except such as was qualified, and temporary, and purel domiciliary. In this sense it is a compound i ca, of which one of the elements is necessarily a loyal people, and a perception of which is discernIble in the fact that under the plan of the proclamations the voters are to be confined to the loyal, or at least that portion of them which has the accidental advantage of having straighter hair or some what whiter skins than the residue. It is enough for my purpose, however, that their politica organizations, through which only they can maintain their appropriate relations to our governmental system, have been, as it is admitted they are, entirely destroyed; a point which could not be well contested in view of the common law rules that govern in cases of public or municipal as of merely private cororations. The proclamations o further in a rming that they have been “ deprived of all civil government whatever, ” which would imply a state ofanarchy, and ignore alike the law o conquest and “the supreme law” under the constitution, and thus exude them from the Union by a strict logical necessity. By this, however, the President intends, no doubt, the local governments alone. He cannot affirm a condition of anarchy, as this would be, so longas he maintains that they are still in the Union and subject to itslaws, or in even asserting, as hedoes by the roclamations themselves, the continuing jurisdiction and authority of the national Government over them. Wit outany governmentwhat ever there can be no social state except that of nature. It is as impossible to conceive the existence of a civil or political State without an organism, as it would be that of an animal or vegetable bod in like redicament. Stripped, however, of a l the political organizations that held them together as members of this Union, they must of necessity have lapsed into a condition where everythin" was lost excet. their territorial relations antf identity. In this condition, however, oflocal dissolution, it is admitted on all hands that they are without powers of selfresurrection; that without governments themselves they must receive their impulse from Qithout from their only remaining sovereign; and that thesedry bones, these festering. decomposing elements must at least be breathed upon in order that they may live; and therefore it isthat the Executive Magistrate, inthe exercise of what he conceives to be his duty, undertakes toim part the required movement by preparing and adjusting the whole machinery, setting it in motion with his own hand, and even prescribing the law by which that motion was to be governed. Whether these States are in or out, is no longer a question, when the rupture of their connections and their own inca acity to restore them without the direction of the ultimate sovereign, are admitted elements in the case. All that remainsis to decide where this transcendent power is lodged, how it is to be exercised, and who it is that is to speak this chaos into order, and to recreate from this admitted anarchy, the future organism that is to claim its place in our system. he proclamations assume thatthis high and imperial function is a urel executive one, an that on the gronn of the constitutional obligation on the part of the U.S. to guaranty to every State in this Union a RFG, and the duty of the President to see that the laws are faithfiilly executed. It is only on the hypothesis either that this rilficer is, not in the modest language of Louis XIV, the State, but the U.S., orthat this executory agreement is in the na ture of a law which may be enforced by the instrumentality of the sword, and without the exercise of any discretion on the part of its minister, that the case can be claimed to fall within the province of the executive Dept. The former of these views which seems to find support in the argument of the Gentfrom NewYork, I shall not trouble myself to answer. If the latter were true, and the duty itself a purely ministerial one, the claim would be unquestionable. It is so far from being true, however, that it would have been impossible even for Congress itself to provide in advance by anygeneralenactment for the many different cases that might arise to demand its fulfillment. They have not even yet decided what is to be considered a RFG within the meaning of the clause, or how it is to be erected in case of the overthrow of any of the existing State governments. They have endeavored, it istrue, to provide for these cases, but have been met by the argument that it would be time enough to cook their bare when it was can ht, or the objection that the Executive had a etter “plan” than their own, which was in itself a confession that it was a matter of doubt and discretion, and anything but the performance of a ministerial duty. T iat plan, like the present one, involved no less a task than the reconstruction of a State from its very foundations, and the declaration of the law that was to govern in the prosecution of that work. In the former case, the power was conferred on a tithe of thuvoters who mirrht take the oath of allegiance and forswcar the institution of slavery. In the latter, it is confined to the loyal men who had voted before, without reference to their numbers, and without any definition of the term, although it was clear that there was scarcely a loyal man in those States except those who were excluded. But will anybody say that the proclamation of the fundamental law of a State is an executive function? If there be any higher act of sovereignty than that which founds or reconstructs a State, and gives or denies the elective franchise to any of its citizens, I do not know what it is. The man who makes the elector makes the laws and the magistrates, and is practically in the enjoyment of a dictatorial power. There are occasions in the extremity of a State when such a power may be necessary for its safety. Nobody has questioned the right of the Executive to govern the conquered territories and that by the rigors of martial lawin the recess of Congress and the absence of any other rule. No man has gone further than myself in the support of measures which Were necessitated by considerations connected with the public safety. I can very well recollect the time when gentlemen upon the other side were startled by the boldness of my claims in favor of a asi dictatorial power in the Executive, and democratle resses held me up as the champlea of absolutism. Then, however, it was claimed but as the extreme medicine of the State, and not its daily bread; not to found an empire, but to save one. Thank God! the occasion for these things has passed away. It is no longer permissible to resort to the war power for apologies for extreme measures, and particularly such as are obviously unnecessary. But there never was anything in that power to warrant the erection of a State by executive proclamation. That is an act of legislation that goes far be ond any example in British history, even in the com lying times of Henry VHI, when a servile parliament made itself alike memorable and infamous by. giving to royal proelamations the force of law. I trust we are not yet ready to emulate and even improve upon this example. I do not relish the exhumation from the reositories of the dead past of such engines o arbitrary power as these. I would as soon think of going to the Tower of London to borrow the material appliances that are still there to testify of the tyranny and barbarism of the buried centuries of England. There is a flavor about them that is neither pleasant nor wholesome. If the work done through such instrumentalities had been in all reSpects what in own judgment would have approved, I should have hesrtated long, on grounds of principle even in the ab sence of any intended interference with the rights of this body, before I would have given my sanction to a precedent so fraught with mischief for future times. I would not even marthe pedigree of the returningStates by allowing a bar sinister in the escutcheon of any of them. I do not care to be associated in history as a member of the 39th Congress of the U.S. along with the dishonored council of the 16th century that betrayed the rights of Englishmen by abdicating its powers in favor of such claims as these. Crown law yers have only defended them in high prerogative times as an ex)edient made necessary by the unfrequency o Parliaments. There is no such apology in these cases. The very object, as confessed by the undisguised hurry to bring these new governments to our doors at the opening of the session in full panoply and comnet array, was to anticipate the action of ongress in the premises. The present Executive, like his predecessor, has his plan of organization. The proclamations disclose it. He had a right; of course, to his opinions. He was, however, a southern man an a citizen of one of the offendin States. He was not likely, therefore, to think in the same way precisely as the 20 millions of the loyal States who had fought this great battle. He had never, if I mistake not, declared himself very strongly against slavery, except so far as it was in antagonism with the Union. His local associations and prejudices of education were (2 priorialmost sure to arrest himat that point where a guarantee of the civil rights of the enfranchised class should be demanded. He had been lo 11land faithful under great trials. That fidelity had made him the choice of the Union party of the North for the 2nd office in the Republic. The bloody hand of treason o ened the way for his succession to the 1st. It adbecome his right. to advise, and his opinions were entitled at all events to the highest possible respect, but the mode of enforcing them was pointed out in the constitution. It was only tirough Congress that he could properl make them known, and the very relation in which he stood toward the loyal States seemed to make it peculiarly approriate that he should take no step without at cast conferring with their representatives. He has not chosen to follow this course. He has preferred to treat directly with the rebels themselves, or to dictate as a conqueror such terms of restoration as were agreeable to himself. I will not say that this was done because he apprehended the existence of a different opinion here, but the effect is, that the opinion of the Executive hurriedinto act in advance of our assemblagesupposin such a difference not impossible is thus sta ed against the will of the representative body., It is the sword of Bren nua flung into the scale. It looks to menny, in the light of the message it isa challenge to Congress and the free North upon a question of jnrisdiction in a case where their exclusive cognizance is not even open to dispute, which we cannot afford to decline, and upon the acceptance or refusal of which will depend the determination of the point whether, in the face of an executive edict, an opposing legislative will is possible. If a claim of this sort was stoutly and successfully resisted by our ancestors, when as serted by the Tudors and the Stuarts, how are we to excuse ourselves to posterity for surrendering it now to a mere temporary Executive of our own choice, with powers so limited and so accurately detined? I trust we have not become so habituated to the exercise of a prerogative like this as to have forgotten that there are boundaries, which in a state of peace no Dept of the Government can safely be allowed to pass. The danger throughoutthe one prefigured by some of the leading spirits of the Revolution; the one foreshadowe when Pat rick Henry declared, “Your President will be a King"has been in this direction only. The vast discretion necessaril lodged in the CommanderinChief in times like those through which we have just passed, the extreme promi nence of his po5ition, and the enormous influence arising from the control of an immense expenditure, were almost sure to give to that otheer a greatly preponderatin weight, and to make the worldaccustome only to royal laws and royal rulebelieve that it was the President alone, and not the Congress or the people, who had saved this nation, and whose usmess it was to store it in all its arts and therefore it whthat the same claim of power in the proclamation of December, 1863, provoked no animadversion here, while the details of the presidential plan were subjected to the severest criticism; and no s ccial complaint was made when the will of the Iawmakin power was disregarded and overruled. An therefore it was, too, that the House bill failed on a 2nd trial and for the some reason it is now that the press and politicians of the nation, instead o controverting the power of the Executive altogether to meddle with the reorganization of these States, and denouncing the attempt on his part as a clear usurpation, have only comlained in whispers and with “bated breath, that he did not extend the rightof suffrage to the black man, while even so intelligent a persona e as Robert Dale Owen has referred to this wor of reconstruction as the greatest of the many difficult and responsible duties which the termination of the war has de volved on the new President, and even the fierce Democracy itself, which made the night of the rebellion hideous with its ululations about arbitrary power, is either smitten dumb with admiration, or swells the peans Of triumphant treason with a chorus of hallelujahs in honor of the wisdom, that surprises and anticipates its wildest hopes. It seems, indeed, to have been wellnigh forgot ten throughout the country, as well as at the other end of the avenue, that we have a congress which is, under the constitution, the lawmaking power of. this nation. People inquire only what does the President intend; while the Associated Press ministers to their curiosity by daily bulletins, reporting every phase of the imperial ulse, as though it were watching by the bedsi e of royalty, and kiudlyinformin us all of the precise terms on which the lrcsident has determined to readmit the traitors on this floor. The time has now come, however, to rectify these errors, and to assert and maintain the rightfuljukisdiction and powers of this body, if they are ever to be asserted again. With the highest admiration of the constancy and hero ism of the present Executive under the severest trials, and with every disposition to support his Administration so far as fidelity to my own high trust will allow, I cannot consent that a question like this, in which the interests of so many generations are involved, shall be withdrawn from the people of the loyal States, who have suffered and sacrificed so largely, and settled by the decision of anyone or even 7 men, no matter whence they come or what positions they may hold. No more can I allow myself to be instructed here, that while the power of settling the terms of readmission is With the president, I have no jurisdiction as an American legislator except to register the acts that he has done, and then humbly inquire as a member of this House only, whether the candidates who present themselves for admission here have complied with the mere formalities which his Legislatures have prescribed. It is here only, in these Halls, that American liberty can live. They are her inner sanctuary her holy ofholics her strong tower of defense, her last refu e an abiding place., Here are her altars, an here her priesthood. It is only here, too, that my own great State, whose blood has been poured out like rain, and whose canonized dead are now sleeping on every battlefield of freedom, has been called into counsel during the last 4 years. She has no voice elsewhere. 0n the theory of the President and the results of his experiments she has given out no uncertain sound. She bids her sons whom she has placed on guard at the Ca itol in this hour of the nations trial, stand faithfully, as did her heroes in the bloody trench, by their trusts as Representatives, and, resist with jealous watchfulness every attempt from whatever unrter to eneroach upon the just powers which she has delegated to them. If the performance of this duty should involve a difference with the Executive ofher own choice while she would deplore the necessity, she will expect her Representatives to take counsel from those who sent them here, alike unawed by the frowns and unseduced by the blandishments of power. I dread the conflict, which is not a new one in the worlds history, but I cannot choose but meet it when it comes; and I have a trust that we shall yetbe able to discuss the great question of the times, and to settle it, too, without prejudicc, and in utter oblivion of the fact that the Executive has any theory on the subect. J It has been said, however, by way of quieting the public fears, that these plans were merely experimental, and that no harm could come of them, because, under the constitution, congress must be the judge at last of the qualiti eations and eligibility of those who might present themselves for admission to seats in that body. The work accomplished, we are now awakened to the fact that the power referred to here is only that of each House acting separately upon the qualifications of its own members. hile the Expeutive assumes the right himself of founding new governments by a new law declaring who shall vote, and settling by telegraph the terms of their constitution s, he is please to claim in his recent message for these creatures of his ownother but still the same with their vitalities repaired at that fountain onlythe right to resume, of course, and without inquiry into his work or theirs, the places which y aningenious fiction they are snpposed to have before held in both branches of the national Legislature, making, as he says, ” the workofrestoration thereby complete; while we are instructed in terms of unusual emphasis that than itwillbe forus, ” each of us for ourselves.” to proceed to judge of the smaller matters of the law in regar to “ the elections, returns, and qualifications of our own members.” These instructions are, perhaps, somewhat unusual, and possibly not that kind of information precisely to which the constitution refers, but do not quarrel with them on grounds of etiquette even though the advicemay seem gratuitous an the jealousy of a British Parliament might rave regarded it as a breach of privilege. 1 hey are not, it is true, exactly in accordance with the tenor of the authorized report of Mr. Stearns, which did convey the opinion that we might “check these new governments at any stage, and oblige them to confess their errors, ” unless it was intended to atiirm that power only as the special prerogative of the Executive himself. hey are, however, the official utterances, and the apology assumes, of course, that there is no question of lo slation involved. With this interpretation o its meaning there is nothing left to congress but to register the edicts and ratify the wor of the Executive. Takingit, howevei, to be otherwise theyare still notless obnoxious to objection. It may be conceded that States have been admitted here without any recedent legislation, though none, I think, where they were organized under the direction of the Military power, and none, certainly, without the concurrent vote of the 2 Houses. By those, moreover, who think that these States were never out, it will be insisted, in accordance with the executive idea, that they want no recognition, and the refusal of Congress to admit their members will be only regarded as a denial of right. But the mere negative of either House upon the question of the ir admission is a power greatly inferior to that which presides over their organization and prescribes the law by which the formative process is to be regulatedjust as inferior as the veto lodged by the constitution in the hands of the Executive is to the initiative of the Legislature. The builders will work according to that law, and as it prescribes, so will the structure be. As we sow, we must expect to reap.” Men do not gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles.” Thus, ifa privileged class is to elect the delegates, their work will be in accordance with the principle of their origin, and will be submitted, if submitted at 7 all, for approval or rejection to the same parties who inspired it; and if the government so framed is to be recognized because it professes to be a representative one, the right of declaring itswhole fundamental law might as well be accorded to the Executive as that of declaring a part of it, and assembling a convention to alter or amend that part. There was no occasion, however, for experiments of this sort, whose only tendency is to forestall the action of the legislative power, or to bring about a mischievous conflict between the 2 branches of the Government. If this is properly a legislative and not an executive function as nobody can successfully denythe President has his veto, at all events, upon the action of Congress. He cannot invert the order and change the constitutional relation by initiating an act of legislation, and leaving to Congress only anegative voice thereon particularly in a case where the voters named by himself are exressly endowed with the power to restore the State to its constitutional relations with the Federal Government and to present such form of government as will entitle it to the guarantee of the U.S., and where, of course, it is expected that their work shall be conclusive. It will be said, perhaps, in reply to all this, that the object here was not to ound a State government, but to allow the legal voters of the old regime the privilege of altering and amending their original forms of government, so as to restore them to their constitutional relations, and entitle them to the benefit of the guarantee. It is not to be disputed that these are a part of the objects stated in the proclamations. I will not say that this was done by way of protest against the logical conclusion from their prem ises, from the whole character of the act itself, and the assumption of power which it involved, that the measure was a revolutionary oneas Governor Orr admits it to have been. I shall be excused, however, for suggestin thatit was unfortunate that the law adviser of the Governmentperhaps its political Nestorshould have overlooked in thisade arture from his own premises, that could scarce yhave been excused in ajunior pleader in the northern States. He had obviously forgotten the recital on which these proclamations restthe postulate that “the revolutionary progress of the rebellion had deprived these States of all civil government whatever, ” and the declaration that the purpose of the seconventions was to enable the loyal people of these Territories not “to alter or amend ” their constitution s, but “to organize, ” or construct anew, where the original government was admitted to have perished. Whenever he shall be able to explain how a constitution can exist in a Government that has been altogether destroyed, or why he should have treated the process of organization as a mere process of repair, I should be glad to hear from him. The man who reaches this conclusion from his premises, will have “no narrow frith to cross. I hope I shall not be considered uncharitable, however, in suggesting that all this inconsequential logic looks to me as if it was the effect of an unha py struggle to escape the consequences of a oc trine which was felt to be necessary in order to raise the power in the President, and is then discarded, after having served that use, in order to remove the case from the jurisdiction of congress. It will require something more, I think, than either the subtlety of a northern place man or the exploded meta hysies of a Kentucky statesman, to reconci c anyone step in the action of the Government, with the idea of the continuing existence of the States. In the same spirit, however, apparently, that prompted the softening down of an organization into a mere question of alteration and amendment, there is a studied avoidance of a phraseology that has found acceptance here without even provoking criticism. We called this heretofore, in our simplicity, by the harm less name of“reconstruction.” Iie AttyGen protests, like Bardol h, “by this light I know not the phrase, ” an straightway our nomenelature fails into disrepute. Well, Iam ready to maintain, if necessary, in the language of the same dramatic personage, that it is “a very soldierlike wor, and of exceeding good command.” It is the merest hypercriticism to object its aplication to the adjustment of our relations with the revolting States; but whatever difference there may be here, it is impossible that there can be any disputeamong scholars in regard to its precise aptitude in describing the reor nization of a State. The question is too big, owever, to be settled in this way. If anybody prefers the word“ restoration, ” I have no objection apart from its historical significance. It was the phrase used on the return of the Stuarts. I he eit is not omine us. Charles H came back with iout conditions, notwithstanding the efforts of Hale, who endeavored to secure them, but was put down by the assurances of General Monk, (I hope we are to have no General Monk in this case.) Bishop Burnet says that this omission was the cause of all the errors of his rei, which it required the Revolution to cure. Know that there is a confidence here, and a longing in some quarters, not unlike that of the Jacobites of England, for the return of the selfexiled royal family of the South, but I trust we are not about to lay the foundation for another revolution by the same mistake. Apart from this, I repeat that I am indifferent as to the word. It is sufficient for me that it implies, if not destruction, at least derangement, disturbance, displacement. The revolting States have, by a new law, deflected from their orbits, gathered round a new center, and ceased to compose a art of our system, or to be obedient to its law. hey want renewal or regeneration. They require to be brought back by an interior adjustment that will reinstate the law that has been broken. They are in the system and comose a part of it only dejure. nobody can say that they are there in point of fact, because that would contradict not. only our knowledge, but our senses. Something, it is admitted on all hands, must be done to ree stablish their relations with the Union. They cannot do it themselves. Nobody pretends that by the mere repeal of their secession ordinances they can resume their places hereas they might do if they have not withdrawnin virtue of their original title, and with all their rights and riv ileges unabridged. Their legislatures nve been even forbidden to assemb e. The Executive thinks that by their act of treason the citizens consenting thereto have forfeited their highest political rightthat of selfgovemmentand that to this extent their constitutions not as they stand now, but as they stood before the rebellionare practically abrogated. He thinks, too, obvious y, that by their abdication or derelictionas in the case of James Hthe sovereignty has la sadbut not to us. A committee of the last House insisted that it returned to the conquered people. He claims it for himself, and accordingly sets aside their Legislatures, Governors, and judges, re constitutes the bodypolitic, declares who shall be its members, and appoints a provisional governor to keep the peace and call the privileged parties together to organize a new government and all this is calle amendment, upon theingenious suggestion that they are to build on the substratum of their dead constitution s! No cun ning phraseology, no artifice ofwords, however, can o ange the nature of athing. The reenactment of a part of an abrogated law, either with or without addition, is no amendment. They might as well have taken the constitution of Pennsylvania to work upon, and in either case the productwould have been a new constitution. But why so studiously insist on the avoidance of other phraseology than this? Because, as it is urged, although the people of a State may destroy their government, it still subsists in grcm i0 legls, or, in the language of the message, following that of aningenious southern Govnor, “in abeyance, ” or, as lawyers would phrase it, in the clouds on the charitable hypothesis that suicide is impossible, because it is forbid den, and, therefore, by a pleasant fiction, all those pregnant acts that have scarred a conti nent with fire, and covered it with ruins, are simply void, and to be ignored as nullitics and this we are now informed by the Executive is “the true theory.” It is undoubtedly the convenient onefor the traitorsbecause it furnishes no solution of the great problem of the times, except in the surrender o all control over the rebellious States, and the restoration of the ir people without conditions and with absolute immunity for all their crimes. Why it is the true one, he has not vouchsafed to show. I know, of course, that the high functionary who dispenses the patronage of such an empire as this is not always expected to render a reason when he chooses to dogmatize, and that, in the view of but too many of the leaders of public opinion, it is impossible for such a man to err. ith a practice, owever, so entirely at variance with this theory, and an admission, too, in the same breath, that “the policy of military rule over a conquered territory”the very rule under which all that region has been governed, and all these States reconstructed during the recess of Congress“ would have implied that, by the act of their inhabitants, they had ceased to exist, ” it would not have been unreasonable to expect an explanation of the course that has been actually pursued within the jurisdiction ofinde pendent States, that enjoye the rare advantage unhappily denied to our raceof being inca pable of sin, and equally unobnoxious to the penalty of death. The only answer that he could have made would have been that the doctrine, although good as a theory, was good for nothing else, because it would not work, and was utterly inadmissible in practice. The State, however, in the judgment of the President, still lives, with only an “im aired vitality, ” although its government has been destroyed. It is dead, to be sure, as Lazarus; in no more trance, where the vital forces are still holding the organization together, but with all its elements putrescent or decomposed; but then there is a power in the Executive, beyond the kingly touch that urged the leprous taint from the blood of the peliBVing, that can awaken it from the slec of death, lead it forth in its graveclothes, ti e it safely over the frith of a 4 years rebellion, and bridge over the unfathomable gulf that during all this time has divided it from the living l Yes, while it is admitted again and again that the old State governments were lost beyond even the means of selfresurrection, this modern Phoenix is supposed by some mysterious conveyance, by some metempsychosis unknown to the philosophers of Greece or the priesthood of the Nile, and only rivaled by the imposture of the Grand Lama himself, to have inherited the vital breath of the defunct State government, thou by that State government, end to us, if not dead altogether, has transniigra into the confederacy, and now lies buried a its ruins. But let us examine this a!lation. . If the acts done by these States had involved only a question of excess of power, as in the case of a law enacted by State legislature in violation of the fundamental law, this view of the case might have derived support from the doctrine that prevails in such cases. Here, however, the fun amental law itself was changed by the very power that enacted it. Whether right fully or not.in view of their Federal relations, is not now the question. ltis sufficient that they did, in point offact, erect new the ruins of the old and thgiso, vaelrtnhmouegnht suit pon ad been expressly forbidden, could not, in the nature ofthings, be prevented. There was nothing in the constitution of the U.S. that could hinder the perpetration of an act either of treason or suici o. They might have allowed their governments to perish by omitting to supply their integral members, or they might have Withdrawn, as they did, from the Federal connection by entering into other alliances, disclaiming its authority, and refusing to obey its law, or take any part in the administration of its affairs. All this they did, and more. It was the act of the people themselves. There was no interregnuin. They carried their constitutions into their new relationschanged, it is true, in this particular, but still republican in form. They might have change them into monarchics. Their new establishments are now overthrown. But how is this to revive others that are admitted to have previously perished? Nobody pretends that it could. The proclamations themselves admit that they have been left without governments and without means of recovery except at the hands of the Executive. Can it be truly said, then, that any portion of the original structure was rescued from the General wreck? If there was, then how much, and who shall declpreit? True, one of the objects stated is to enable them to restore themselves. But does anybody insist that they can do it? Is this consistent with the grounds on which the proclamations rest? lftrhey can, what is to be said in apology for executive interference? If they can, what is to be said of the other object declared in these instruments, which is “ to enable the people of these States to present such forms of government as will entitle them to the benefitof the constitutional guarantee, by restoring them to their constitutional relations, and their people, therefore, to protection from invasion, insurrection, and domestic violence?” What does all this mean? If they were States in the Union, it required no process of organization or restoration to confer on them the advantage of these rights, because they were entitled to them already by the very letter of the Constitution. It is because they are not, because they have been “deprived of all civil government whatever, ” that. the President proposes to make them so, and to endow them with these rights anew by reannexing and bringing them again into the Federal connection from which they have been confessedly detachedupon a new title, hv his own act, and without any agenc of ours. this a confession of outlawry which no legal acumen. noingenuity of phrase, can explain away, and it is worse than idle to quibbleupon forms of expression in the face of such an a mission. But supposing these State constitutions to be still in force as they existed antecedently to the passage of the several ordinances of secession, on the ground that all thathas been enacted since in violation of the Federal law was simpl void, what then was the occasion for any amendment, and whence does the President derive his authority to interfere at all, and to change the law as it stood before, even on the subject of amendments? In that case they may return, of course, whenever they think proper, without any legislation whatever. why await the repeal of an act that is absolutely void? What XSJO prevent them from coming back with their constitutions as they are? Takiu it to be a question of amendment only, it is c earl in their dis“ction to amend or not; and i they are still e Uliion, there is no power here or else “z say what amendments they shall make, flqshall not resume their places here without alteration of any sort. The executive branch of the Government admits, however, that something must be done to restore these outlaws to their original status in the Union. The war has reSulted, as we agree in thinking, in the emancipation of the slave, and the destruction of the elective franchise along with the government; and these things must be in some way acknowledged. They are unquestionably forfeiturcs; but should they refuse to recognize them. that refusal would, on his hy pothesis, constitute no sufficient reason for excluding them. The question of the effect of the reclamation of freedom is one that belongs to the courts, and on cannot draw it within the jurisdiction of congress or the President, except by assumin that these States are out and must be formal yrcadmitted. In that case you may prescribe terms. Without that you must open when they knock, without inquir as to t ieir constitution s, with which you wi I then have nothing to do. To stipulate for the acknowledgment of these things is but to treat for their readmission on that basis, and amounts to no more or less than a compromise with a belligerent, and they may reject the conditions because you can impose no terms of amendment upon them. Taking it, however, that their constitutions do require to be amended for these purposes, how is this work to be done? Not by executive direction certainly. The President has no more power to set up a new class of electors in SCarolina than in Massachusetts. There is but one way, and that is in accordance with the law which they prescribe themselves, which must have survivedpif any part of their constitutions did. The process which ignores that law, as the proclamations do, is radical and revolutionary, and is no less in effect than absolute reconstruction. The sovereign power of the people may act in this we undoubtedly, but when it does there is an end of the existing government. A word now as to the answer that all this was intended only to allow to the people the privilege of doing this work themselves. lfthe object had been only to keep the peace for the purpose of allowing these people to decide whether they would erect a new government and up ly for readmission into the lnion, nobody wou d have complained, although the necessity for interfering in this way was conclusive that they were not in a condition to exercise these rights, and that the act was not a voluntary one. But they were not asking the privilege of comin back again. It was not essential that they should come until they were read for it. It was essential that when they did, it should be of the ir own pure volition. To compel it was as impracticable as it was unde sirable and yet the essence of the proclamations is a command. They are not permissive but imperative. The people might not be ready, but that made no difference. if any of them failed, itwas a default. The right to vote was not a privilege, but a duty. be white men who were loyal and would take the oath must reconstruct their governments at all events. It is idle to say, therefore, that this was a mere indulgence to their prayers. It went in advance of the wishes of the people, and this is the construction placed upon it by the highest intelligences of the Sout and now as to the way in which the power claimed by the Executive has been exercised. If the function were a purely executive one, it could not o, of course, beyond the more permission fort leassemblage of conventions, and the pledge of protection to the citizen in the exercise of this privilege. To favor classesto proclaim that this or that citizen should not be allowed to vote, was something more than an executive act. In the case of a civil dissolution and the absence of all government, such as the proclamations admit, a lwerc, of course, remitted to that natural equality which is recognized in the DeclarIndep, and had only been suspended by force of the civil institutions which had then ceased 1. O exist. The right of the negro, whether previously in bond or free, was in that condition of things as perfect as that of the white man, and the latter adno more right to say to the former that he should not vote than the former had to hold the same language to him. All privileges of caste or complemon that existed under their old constitutions were gone along with the constitutions themselves and this is in accordance with the doctrine everywhere received through out this nation, where all limitations upon this right, except those which depend on condition on y, are the results of express enactment. It was no question, therefore, of grace or favor or indulgence, and it cannot, of course, he said in excuse for the prohibition, that it was not competent for the Executive to confer the privilege on this particular class. It was not his to confer on anybody, either white or black. If he had left the election to the citizens who owed allegiance, paid taxes, and were subject to bear arms, they must have voted without distinction of color. The only question was, not whether he could confer it but whether he could take it away. He has taken it away from other sfrom all who were not qualified under the old constitution s, and from alwho are disloyal or refuse the oath to support the laws and proclamations in regard to slavery. The old governments with their black codes, which were the fruitful nurseries of treasonable sentiment, and have destroyed themselves by hurrying their people into the rebellion, are allowed to furnish the rule and standard of electoral fitness, on the hypothesis that there is something left of them that still lives, like the tail of a defunct reptile after the very life has been crushed out o its body, and are only to undergo alteration and repair at the hands of the same cunning workmen who had destroyed their machinery altogether. It is the same class precisely that is to renovate the work. True, it is with the condition of loyalty, and a new oath, sufferadded. But what are these? Who are the loyal? Not certainly those who committed treason against the nation by waging war against it, or giving aid and counsel to its enemies? But it they are excluded who are to be the voters, when the only class that proved true to its allegiance is precisely the one which was excluded under the old regime that it is now sought to restore? How many of the original voters, beyond those who were driven into exile, have stood by the old flag in the hour of our trial? Was it a majority was it even atithe? Can there be as many such men found as would have saved Sodom from destruction? We know that there cannot, because we know that they would not have been tolerated on southern soil. We know it too, from the declaration of the Governor of Virginia, that unless the law that disfranchised the traitors only from January, 1864, was repealed, there would not be men enough left to organize the State and is it seriously propose that the power of erecting governments, in order to enable these States to resume their places in the Union, shall be vested in a scoreof men out of a population counting by millions? But how is the question of loyalty to be deter mined? Not by the oath, because that is merely cumulative, and is not offered either as a test, or by way of purgation for past offenses. Ifas a test, the word might as well have been omitted altogether. How then? Is there a virtue in the amnesty which works not only oblivion for the past, but converts a ardoned traitor into a loyal man? Is it by judginent of law on conviction of crime? is it by attainder on proclamation by the Executive? Is it by a trial ais or by coinpurgators at the liustin s? lft e old constitutions are still in force, either by construction of law or by virtue of the proclamations, the exclusion even of those who may be impeached of disloyalty looks amazing y like the forcfeiture of a legal franchise, without jpdgment and without law, and is too high a power to be exercised by any other than the sovereign. But there is another condition superadded by way of abridgment of the right; and that is the exaction, even from the loyal, of the oath. 1866. 791 to support the proclamations and laws relating to slavery. No friend of the country will of course obJect to any wholesome limitations upon the privilege; but if it was not competent to the President, not to confer, but only to permit it to the black man, what authority was there to limit it in this way to the white man? Neither the constitution of the U.S. nor that of any of the States has ever required an oath of this sort from the voter. Ifhc could impose this, what was there to prevent him from swearing them to the observance of all acts of Congress and all proclamations, or requiring them to swear that they had never given any aid or countenance to the rebellion? If he could disfranchise the unconvicted traitor, what was there to prevent him from enfrauchising the loyal man who has become free? But what is the security which it furnishes? How long is the obligation to endure? Did it bind the members of the conventions? and if these bodies have defined the qualification in a different way, are the voters now free? The programme is in effect to recommit these governments to the hands of the very men who urried them into the rebellion, upon the sole condition of a new obligation of fealty, after having just broken aprevious one, and to aban don the field to the conquered as soon as it is won! Was over such a denouement to such a drama? But is there anybody in the loyal States who is willing to release all the securities, all the rights and advantages acquired by the war, and prescribe no terms to those whose lips have just been dyed with perjury, and whose hands are still dripping with the blood of cur butchered sous, except a renewal of theiral ready broken vows, which they will make voluntarily, and then claim to have no binding force because they have been made under a sort of duress, on the ethics taught by a distinguished casuist of Maryland? What kind of a test is this for a statesman? Would an rational Government on earth be content with such a caution? Who does not know its utter worthlessness? What is it but the fiaxen tie that bound the wrists of the Hebrew champion? What isits value, in view of the events of the rebellion that have now passed into history? How is our past experience? Have these people ever kept faith with us? Did it hold any of the rebel leaders who filled employments either civil or military under the Iederal Government, or under those of the revolting States? Was not erjury exalted into honor of the highestcliiva ric type; children taught by their own southern mothers that they were under no obligation to keep faith with Yankees, and that 51c might sw arand forswearthemselvesagaiu an again, to save their persons or their property: and the very highest species of the crimen falsi canonized even by the tender and admiring regards of northern generals and northern statesmen? It may be safely assumed, as a general proposition. that those who were most orward to abjure their sworn allegiance here, will be the 1st to violate their newmade vows, by swearing themselves back again into legislative honors and governmental favors. Tint will you consent to turn over the few Union white men, and your 1,000s of faithful allies among the blacks, to the tender mercies of these unconverted and unrepentant rebels, and bring them back again into these Halls on pledges of fidelity that amount at last to no more than an engagement not to repeat an experiment against which you will now want no other security than the recollection of your power? If you are wise you will not be content with any assurances, that are either purchased by interest or extorted by necessity. You will render it impossible for them to deceive you again, by refusin to trust them until they shall have ree stablish led their title to your confidence. Securityis more imriortant to you than" punishment, ay, even than the demands of justice. others may. do as they please, but as for me, I must beg to be excused from giving my faith to these new fled edneophytes, these unbaptized renegades antithey have stripped to the skin and bathed themselves thoroughly in the waters of regen eration. But, supposing this guarantee be a merely executive fiinction, how does the manner of performance s uare with the object sought to e attained 2 he obligation is to assure a government that shall be republican. The meaning of this is that it shall be a government of the people. The process adopted, in direct contravention of the principles Of the message, is to lodge the power in the hands of a privileged class, the same that held it before, distin ishable only by the accident of color, along with a disloyalty to the Union that was almost universal, and composing, in someinstaiices, a minority of the whole o ulation. Does this look like a fulfillment ot e obligation, or even squint in that direction? The form, it is true, may be republican, because it looks to representation by election. But that is not the test. If it were, every constitutional monarchy in Europe might be brought within the category. It is the distinction of classes, the permanent limitation of the right of suffrage to a favored few, that makes the difference between the aris tocratic and republican forms, and there is none other. In this case the right is confined to the loyal white man who will take the oath. This, however, if not an oligarchy or government of the few, is at least an aristocracy or government of classes, and furnishes a perfect exemplifi ention of just that species of legislation which is so earnestly reprobated in those passages of the message where the President informs us that “this Government springs from and was made for the people:" that “it should, from the very consideration of its origin, be strongin its power of resistance againstteestablishment of ine qualities;” that “ monopolies, perpetuities, and c pass legislation are contrary to the genius of a free Government and oughtnot to be allowed;” that “here there is no room for favored classes or monopolies, ” and that “we shall fulhll our dutiesas e slators by according equal and exact justice to all men, special privileges to none.” If I have found occasion to commend his pradtice at the expense of his theory upon the question of State sinlessness and stateimmortality, subscribingas I do most heartily to these axioms of political science, I shall feel myself compelled to adjust the account by following his advice in opposition to his practice here.” Class legislation” and “special privileges” of a sovereign character, aret e distinguishing features of his plan, and it is, therefore, by the erection of an aristocrac that the guarantee of a republic is to be may e good! Whether these States he in the Union or not, it is conceded by the Executive, in the effort to provide them with republican governments, that they are now without them; and this, I suppose, for the reason that they have no governments at all. The same result, however, would have followed from the change in the condition of the slave. A Government that not only denies to a majority, or even a large portion of its free citizens, the privilege of any share in its administration, but rejects their testimony as witnesses, interdicts to them the acquisition of knowledge, or refuses the advantages of the marital relation, is not republican, and the men who have made these laws, and insist on maintaining them now, will never make it so. Mr. Burke remarks that, takin the State to mean “the whole commonwealth, with all its orders, and all the rights appertaining to each, ” “to be under the State, but not the State itself, or any part of itthat is, to be nothing at all in the commonwealth, is a condition of civil servitude by the very force of the definition. Servorum nonest respublica is a very old and a very true maxim. The servitude that makes men subject to a State without being citizens may be more or less tolerable from many circumstances, but these circumstances do not alter the nature of the thing.” and this he regards as a modified form of slavery; while “the exclusion of whole classes of men from the higher or ruling part of the commonwealth, as in the case where a hereditary nobility possesses the exclusive rule, is only held to imply a lower and degraded state of citizenship. But even there it is only the office, and not the franchise, that is denied to the subject.” “Our constitution, ” he continues, “was not made for great, general, or prescriptive exclusions. Sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution. In our constitution there ins always been a difference between a franchise and an office, and between the capacity for the one and for the other. Franchises are supposed to belong to the subject as a subject, and not as a member of the governing part of the State. The policy of the Government has considered them as things very different; for when Parliament excluded by the test acts Protestant dissenters from all civil and military employment, they never touched their right of voting for members of Parliament, or sitting in either House”both these being treated by him as franchises of which the subject could not be deprived. In a republic, however, there is no proper distinction between the governing part and the subject, and the office, of course, would stand on the same ground as the franchise. An American statesman of the present day would say, perhaps, that the elective franchise, the most important of them all, is not the property of the citizen, because it is not a natural right, but a political one. I have heard such language here, even on this side of the House, again and again. I am too dull to comprehend the distinction. I take it that all governmental agencies, all political contrivances and privileges, are but the machinery for the protection of the great natural rights of humanity, which protection is admitted by the Declaration itself to be the only legitimate object of all government. Why are our institutions free? Because they allow to you and me the privilege of governing ourselves. Why am I a free man? For no other reason than because I am armed with the ballot for my own protection as a citizen. Strip me of that and I am at your mercy. You may deal gently with me, it is true, and so might the Sultan of Turkey, but that makes no difference. I am still the slave of your caprice, and my rights and happiness may depend, like your temper, on the state of your digestion. You may designate this franchise by what but you cannot refine name you please, it away by verbal intinctions or scholastic subtleties, by calling it political or giving to it any other nomenclature. You mi lit as well deny me all the rights of a citizen, because they are. all political, as deny me that onethe most important of them all which is essential to the protection of the residue. Nor can you pilfer it from me by the of assigning to it the distinction of a prerogative or privilege. I know no prerogatives here, and no privileges that are not, or at least ought not to be common to us all: The message itself reprobates a subterfuge like this when it asserts the great republican idea of “equal rights for all, special privileges to none.” o: you must either settle the principle that this 18 a white mans Government alone, or you must share all your political rights with men of all complexions who inhabit among you. The Democrats, ar excellence, who love slavery for its own so re, and do not of course favor the doctrines of either liberty or equality as to the black man, accept the alternative that this is a white mans Government as does the President himself in his onesided argument with the dusky committee that waited on him a day or 2 ago, when he declines to answer as to SCarolina, assumes that the are not a portion of the people, and advises them to emigrate from the country which he had previously declared to be their ownand are therefore consistent and logical in denying the suffrage to the negro, as they are in favoring the police that ignores the war and seek store the aristocracy of the South. I wish I could say as much for the Union as a whole on tparty this floor. Gentlemen o faith are without apology when they agree. The proclamation has made the free. He counts in the representation. He pays taxes, and must bear arms if necessary, and he has done it. No sensible man now pretends to doubt that he is a citizen, or can doubt it in view of these considerations. The interference of the Executive is put expressly on the ground of the obligation of the national authority to secure a RFG to each of the States. To effect this, it is essential that a majority should be allowed to enjoy the political right of governing, and that all should share a like in its direction. To put any class under the State would be to deprive them of the rights of citizens, and to reduce them, in the words of the authority just cited, to a state of civil servitude. It is essential, moreover, that it should rest, in the language of the Declaration, on “the consent of the governed.” An establishment that does not conform to these principles is not republican, whether the power be lodged with the oligarch or the aristocrat matter as to its forms. We are not to be cheated by appearances or names. It was something more than the mere form that the constitution intended to secure and yet the process here ignores all these things and rests either upon the dimmest perceptions of free government or upon the southern theory that the negro is not a man, or that this Government was only intended for white men. were to exclude all men of Celtic blood, what a sensation would it not produce among the Democracy? If the difference, however, is only against the African, consistency would require that he should also be excluded from the enumeration hereafter. With the end of the “divine institution, ” the 3/5ths clause, which stipulated fora representation, not of or for him, who was not then a man, but for his master, has ceased to operate. If the freed slave is now a citizen, he has a right to all the privileges, as he is confessedly subject to all the duties which that relation involves. If instead of rising from the fractional value to that of an integer, he is no longer a member of the State, he must cease to owe any other than a domiciliary allegiance, and the idea of a representation founded on his existence here, must be exploded forever and from this dilemma there is no escape. If he is a citizen the elective franchise is his right. If he is not, representation on that basis is logically inadmissible. The effect of the oligarchic process is to reinstate the governing class as it was before, without an upon it. This we cannot afford to o. There is, fortunately for us, a loyal element among them that has helped us to bring them back, and may be used to keep the peace, not by either arming or disarming it, but by the restoration of a mere right, which is essential to its protection as well as our own: It is a happy circumstance that the measure of security required by the pee 1c of the loyal States is precisely that which the constitution has imposed on us as a duty. The obligation is to warranty to every State in this Union a RFG. If“ the whole commonwealth, comprehending all its orders, with the privileges belonging to each, ” is not republican, we are bound to make it so, and are endowed by the constitution with all the powers necessary or that purpose. But how are these owners to be exercise I Not by the President, cause he cannot prescribe the terms. Not by “ mere refusal on the part of Congress to admit, because that would be are refusal to perform, but by an act of legislation which it will be only the duty of the President to enforce. It is a narrow view of this duty which gives to it a merely negative character, such as to put down a, or drive out a tyrannical majority. There is a positive obligation to war rant or make sure to all the people a RFG; and here is the owner that has been sought for so diligently under the law of war, to deal with the conquered territories in such a way as to secure to their loyal people the rights to which they would be entitled a RFG, and Union itself from all future disturbance. These States are without governments of any sortthose which existed and were disloyal having been overthrown. It is our constitutional duty to supply them with new ones of a republican character, and to provide that none 0t or shall be erected. If their black populationif a majority of theirloyal inhabitants nay, if a mere minority demand the fulfillment of this guarantee, by insisting that we shall provide them with a government that shall admit them to the rights of citizenship, and be at least partly within their own control, we cannot evade the performance by the plea of a want of constitutional power. The declaration of the duty gives it to us, with all the incidental means. That duty is not denied; but we have wielded the sword so long to enforce the law, that many people have come to the conclusion that there is no other wea on for such a case, when in point (if fact it is o early inade quate to this part of the work, and the power of the Legislature is the only one that can successfully accomplish it. It is undoubtedly in accordance with our practice, as it is with the spirit of our institutions, that it should be left to the people themselves, in the 1st place, to be performed by them in that condition of freedom which our arms have given them. But if they will not do this of their own accord ifthe class that has been accustomed to rule, will insist on holding the rein and denying to their fellows, even to a respectable minority of them, the rightful privilege of citizens under a republic, I know no possible way of meeting the case but by interposing ourselves and prescribing a fundamental law for the occasion. It will not be enough, as I have already remarked, to refuse the Congressmen who may ally on terms that are inadmissible to us. 1 at would be only a denial of justice to the disfranchised which might prove indefinite, instead of the fulfillment of an admitted obligation. If there be any limitation of the right of suffrage it must come from the supreme authority, which is here. There is no power elsewhere, and certainly none in a society that is yet in a state of chaos, formless and void, and with nothing but darkness brooding over it. That authority, it is true, might welldisfranchiseindividuals, such as the traitors themselves, for an enormous crime which showed that they could not be safely trusted with so important a function. It could not, however, prescribe a whole class, comprising a majority of the loyal people, all native to the soil and impeached of no crime, merely because they had black skins or wooly hair, without violatin the essential principles of republicanism, an laying the foundations of an aristocratic government. No argument could defend it, except on the judicial hypothesis that the race so excluded had no rights at all that a white man was bound to respect, which would be fatal of course, as already shown, to the whole principle of representation as applied to it. But this hypothesis has no foundation in our early history or practice. The founders of this Government never dreamed of such a distinction. The great charter of our fathers had before affirmed the equality of all men. It was not race or color, but condition, that created the constitutional disability. The slave, of course, could not, in the nature of things, be admitted to the privileges of a citizen, because that would have been inconsistent with his condition. Everybody else was counted, except the Indian who paid no taxes an incarnation, by the way of the revolutionary formula, stereo typed on the hearts of the colonists, that condensed the causes of their struggle into 2 memorable and might words. the notion that a taint of African blood, or any diversity of complexion, was a disqualifying feature, is a modern invention, which purely is but the growt of that barbarous and unnatural system that has debauched the moral sentiment, and left in many minds only the feeblest conceptions of rational freedom. The free negro voted originally almost everywhere. It was a consequence only of his unquestioned citizenship. To admit him, it did not require a special grant by the insertion of the word “black” in any republican constitution. To exclude him it did require the insertion of the word “white.” The on y color that the framers of the constitution seem to have ostracized is the red. But even here it excepted the tax payer, and was not by a designation of race. e had sense enoug to know that a principle o exclusion resting on so uncertain a basis as color, would be unfitted for any constitution. Apart, however, from the considerationsal ready stated, there are special reasons in the present case for insisting that the guarantee shall be fulfilled in good faith; and these are, to recompense the black man for his unwavering loyalty in the hour of trial, to afford him the means of selfprotection in the enjoyment of the rights he has so richly earned, and if these are not enough, to protect ourselves against any future disturbance from the same arrogant and presumptuous class which has just been chastised into a decent respect for our selves and a reluctant submission to our laws. We began the war by repelling the black man and returning him to his master; by doing everything, in short, to alienate him from our selves, and prove to him that he had nothingto expect from us; and this was called statesman ship 1 If ever a people deserved to be chastised it was ourselves, for the inetfable baseness and fatuity which refused the aid of the negro, and sent a 100,000white men to die, rather than wound the ride, or harm the property of an enemyl efailed to drive him from our support even by the unkindest usa e. When we plunged within the stormcloud that overhung the South, and concealed everything from outsideview, we were not long in discovering that the white skin was ever where synony mous with the traitor heart, an that wherever we could meeta black man we were sure to find a friend. He took our soldier by the hand, led him through the outposts, pointed out the secret path, traveled with him by night, shared his last crust with him, and ha ed the blood hounds that were on his track. As the war progressed, webegan to find that with such an auXiliary against us, success was i possible. We made him free. But still we con] not lift him into the position of a soldier, which was a privilege or caste in ancient times. People who foresaw that the step was an easy one from the soldier to the citizen themselves of craven hearts and more slaves than heinsisted that he was like his detractors, loved his chains, and was a coward by instinct, and that the white soldier wasa fool, who would throw down his arms if you sent him an auxiliarywhose skin was not quite as fair as his own. You listened and believed. But by and by, impelled by necessity, you allowed your brave an rightthink.ing SecyWar to arm him quietly. You rather winked atthan encouraged it; and before long the truth blazed upon ou from the trenches of I ort Hudson that t ie by ack man was in your ranks. He has now added to the title that God Almighty gave him, a claim upon your grati tude. How do you propose to pay it? Nothing is clearer than that you have made the privilege of the ballotnecessary for his protection, by making him nominallyfree, and using him to put down the rebellion of his master. That master will not soon forget the infidelit of the slave on whom he relied, or the humi iation that the proud chivalry has suffered at the hands of its own born thralls. Even the bond of interest that compelled him to treat that slave with kindness, because he was his money, is now broken. Unable to wreak his baflied vengeance upon you he longs to pay back the debt he owes you, by visiting his impotent malice upon the humble instrument of your triumph, and proving to the world the truth of what he has so often told it, that you have only made his condition worse by ele vating him to freedom. He begs you to with draw your black troops. He wishes to be relieved from your authority, by being allowed to resume his place in the Uynion which he hates. For this he is willing to recognise the 1866. 1. 3.; 793 " results of the war in the nominal emancipation of the slave, if on will leave him subject to his authority, without rights of citizenship, and without any security for the practical enjo,ment of the liberty on have given him. e can afford to make this offer, and others which the Executive hails as unexpected evidence of progressbecause he cannot help it. The only surprise to me is that on such an invitation the whole South did not rush incontinently into the executive embrace. But will you accept it? If you do, what is your gift of freedom to the black man? It is but “the Dead sea fruit, that tempts the eye but turns to ashes on the lips.” hat will you have done for “the ward of the Republic, ” as he was characterized by our generous and nobleminded martyr presicnt, if he is to pass into the condition of a Pariah, and to accept just such terms as his humbled and exasperated master may impose on him? You will only have mocked him with the mirage of liberty to make his condition ten fold worse than it was before. Is this the fulfillment of your plighted faith? Was it your purpose only “ to keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the hope 3” It was the veryrefinement of cruelty to have ins ired such hopes, only to disappomt them. lyetter, far better, have left the miserable victim of your guile to the slavery in which you found him, content, perhaps, with his condition, and dreaming of no change, than thus to lift him from the earth, only to dash him down a ain under the feet of his oppressor. Better or yourselves, too, for your present credit and your future fame, if on addeclined his services alto ether. The world, in that case, would only have regarded us as fools. point its finger of scorn at the Government which was capable of the meanness of turnin its back on the benefactor to whom it appeale, and appealed successfully, in the hour of its sore distress. What is this but trusting the lamb to the vulture? Will the governing class, to whose tender mercies you are expected to turn him over, because they understand his nature and his interests better than on do, ever suffer him to rise from his degraded condition? What is your experience already on this point? What earnest, what foretastc, what assurances do these men give you of future ref ormation, even now that the motives for good behavior are so exigent and overwhelming? The condition of the lack man as a slave disqualified him as a witness against the master race, who were thus practically in the exercise of a power that place his person and his life at the mercy ofhis paler brother. He is now free. Without this privilege, he has no rights that a white man can be compelled to respect. It is essential to his security. No court within the wide area of civilization would exclude him or any other man from the witness stand on the ground of race or color. If admitted, and untruthful, as they insist he is, his credibility is still a question for ajury of white men and yet with this advantage, this badge of servitude is still insisted on, and instead of closing the courts of justiceif they deserve that name, where evidence is excluded on system, and the tribunal of aTurkish cadi would be shamed the Federal Government submits to the humiliat in necessity of Withdrawing all controversies, wherever the rights of a negro are involved ignoring those wherein his testimony might be require between white men Within a special jurisdiction of its own, while it allows these people to make constitution s, just to enable them to escape its power, and do their own will in such particulars as these, as though they were really free of our rule and could be safely trusted with the performanceof such a work! But how is it in regard to the marital relation, with all its incidents? How as to education and preparation for the ballot? Have the schools been thrown open to him? Is he free to work on his own terms, to acquire property, to go about wherever his interests or inclination may lead him, and to seek employment at such wages as he can fairly earn or is he still subject to condemnation as a vagrant, and sale or apprentice It will now justly I ship for fines and jail fees? What says the official report of General Schurz, the result of a long and extended tour, which is so mysterious y ignored, while in the face of its authentic and overwhelmin testimony the President is relinquishing ouriloodbought conquee tsto the enemy without even taking the advice of congress, though now sitting at the capital, and proving the tranquillity of the South y the result of a 5 days sojourn in 3 of its principal towns, which developed the fact that black troops could not be employed to advantage because it would be necessary to accumulate them in large bodies for their own protection? How is it in Mississippi, where the local militia are already stripping the negro of the arms purchased from you as cherished heirlooms, car memorials, consecrated by the war of libert, and stained, perhaps, with their own blood, spilt in your own defense, or with the blood of the discomfited barbarians who are now so valor ously disarming them? How is it in Teiinessee? How in Virginia? It is not the overthrow of the rebellion, but of the abolitionists of the North, that constitutes the inspiring and exultant theme of the Speaker of its House of Delegates. He thanks God that Virginia can still trample on the rights of the black man, because, as he thinksand as the Executive thinks of all these States she has never been out of the Union. How, then, is the condition of the negro improved by emancipation, under a policy that cuts him off from the enjoyment of all protection in person or property, and is intended obviously to keep him in the bonds of servitude, and to prove to the world that the real victory is theirs, and that your boon of freedom was only a cheat and a delusion? What is there to prevent the reenactment of the whole black code in any of these States as soon as they shall have been relieved from our control by readmission into the Union upon the terms of the Executive? If you objectay, even to the imprisonment of a northern seamanyou will be told as formerl that these are matters of State regulation on y. Will you appeal to the courts or send embassadors to Charleston to negotiate an amicable submission? They will set your courts at defiance, and drive you i out with scorn and contumely, as they did be fore, and the Democracy of the North will clap their hands and exult over your discomfiture. Is the peace of the country to be secured in this way? You have carried the cup of freedom to the lips of the black man and he has drunk of it. If you would make of him a peaceful citizen, and an obedient member of the State, you must protect him in the enjoyment of the liberty you have given him. To do this it is only necessary to invest him with the defensive armor of the ballot. That will secure to him the consideration of the white man. That will make it the interest of the superior classes to cultivate him. That will educate him into an intelligent acquaintance with his duties. That will secure peace and harmony to the land. i The black man has shown himself to be as docile, gentle, and hu mane as he has approved himself loyal and brave. He will mak dealt with. But remember! he isaman, who has tasted liberty, and felt the low of an unaccustomed manhood, as his u se danced with a new inspiration when he lgoked up at the folds of your stn banner on the perilous edge of the battle. nVgeware how you allow these men, who have never yet learned, and never will learn anything, to trample on him now. The policy foreshadowed in the proclamations will make only a discontented people. It is the slogan of battle the heral s denouncement of that war of races, which is so strangely opprehended by those who urge the very opposite policy to eal up a war of sections. It is the preparation for these deluded people of a future, before which even the sav e horrors of their own revolt may ale. The kindred policy that ruled our councils in, the same interest for 2 long yearsas it seems to rule them now proved fatal to the system it was intended to serve by making its preservation impossible. eavaluable citizen if fuirly It may be that God Almighty intends to finish His great work by giving a further rein to the infernal spirit that precipitated these madmen into the revolt that melted the chains of their slaves. Let us see to it that we be not called upon to repress the outbreak of nature, by drawing 0dr own swords hereafter upon our faithful allies in the war of freedom. We can prevent this nowand will if we are wiseby a mere act of justice that is. simple and reasonable, and Wlll trench on no mans rights, while it will extend the area of freedom by popularizing these governments and bringing them at once to the republican standard of the constitution. That act is demanded by considerations of the highest wisdom, as well as of the strictest justice. It were a foul shame to refuse it, and u fouler still to add to that refusal the future possible infamy of turning Our own arms, at the call of these delinquents, upon the trusty auxiliaries who have assisted in subduing tiem, when the tyranny of their oppressors and the instinctive yenrnings of humanity, may drive them to resistance. should blush for my country, and weep for it, too, if it was capable of an atrocity so uuut terably base. But though we were even insensible to the claims of justice and the emotions of gratitude, and entirely indifferent to the elevation of the negro race for its own sake, we want their vote for our own protection. Our best security is to erect a brea ewater against the eneroachments of the disaffected white man by enlisting the counteracting influence, the chea support in peace, of the loyal black man, to whiom we have so successfiilly appealed in war. We need his suffrage now to assist us in keeping that peace which he had solarea share in making. ITake away his musket, i you please, but do not disarm him entirely. The question with me is not whether you can trust him, but whether you can trust the man who asks you to give him the rule again over his rescued bondsman. There are 2 classes of white men in the seceding States. The higher and more intelligent is essentially antiRepublican inhabit and sentiment, while the in erior and ignorant is even more object and servile than the slave himself. He may be educated, however, into a just selfrespect and a sense of his own interests. The governing class never can. To make them republican you must change their whole social system and their natures along with it. Until you do, and they are thoroughly regenerated, they will be unsafe depositaries of power in aGovernment like this. Ifyou will not disfranchise the man who has already shown that he is unworthy of trust, yOu must at least render him powerless for mischief by placing a sentinel over him, with the bloodless but potent weapon of the ballot to kee him in order. I do not insist that you shall isfranchise the rebel who professes to have repented, because without him you will have no white element in the case. I have no objection that you should pardon his crime and even restore to him his lands, if you think that the interests of justice require no indemnity, and no examples. My object is not vengeance. I do not thirst for his blood, even with all his barbarities. Give him back everything else. But for the power which he has shown himself unworthy to hold, and which he has so justl forfeited, restore not that, I adjure and beseec you, by the recollection of the bloody trial through which you have passed; by the respect you owe to the bereave, the widowed the or phaned, the maimed who yet live; anh above all, by the memory of your martyred, butchered, starved, and mutilated dead. Insult them not by the declaration that the earth has drunk their blood in vain. Expose not yourselves to the bitter reproach, that before their bones have been gathered by pious hands from the fields where they have been left to bleach unburied, their very murderers have been hurried back into our embrace like returning conquerors. If this reunion is to be solemnized on terms like these, wait at least until you have put 1" your mourning, and stripped your public plNl of the habiliinents of woe. Bury yor” murdered President out of sight. Coverup the graves of andersonville, with all their horrid secrets, and then then celebrate these unholy nuptials ifyou can. Let it not be said, at all events, to your discredit, that “the funeral baked meats have coldly furnished forth the marriage table.” Open no hall of Valhalla, where the returning braves of the South shall quaff their foaming ale, and pledge you from the glrinning skulls of your own dead and forgotten croes. But there is another consideration that gives us the right, and makes it an imperative necessity, for our own protection, to insist that the negro shall be allowed to share the rights of citizenship in their highest sense, and that is the fact that the conversion of the chattel into a free man will greatly enlarge the representation of those States, and bring into Congress some 30 votes on the basis of this peculiar population, while the loyal States must suffer from the increase. If they come, it must be in a Representative capacity of course. But whose Representatives will they be, if the whole class in whose names they come, and for whom they profess to speak, is to have no voice in their election? To call them representatives of any other than the rulin class would be a gross abuse of language. lhe benefit of your act of emaiiciation then is to inure to the master who has on eavored to break up your Government, while the black man still holds substantially the relation of a slave, and is only used to count for the benefit of his oppressorsl and whom will they send to manage the affairs of the Union in the name of the slave? Will it be the man whom he would select himself? Will it be an advocate of his interests? Will it be those who. will provide for the payment of the debt of the war, or the pensions ledged to the families of the brave soldiers whose very bones will he s urned aside with contumely by the rebel p owman? What is our experience thus far? Among the 1st men sent here from Louisiana was a signer of the secession ordinance, and all 3 gravitated at once, as by a natural law, into the ranks of the party that opposed the war. The 1st offering from Arkansas to the other end of the Capitol was a graduate of the same school. But Will the holders of our public debtwill our brave volunteers agree to this? No! Ask the men here, however, who sympathized with the rebellion throughout, and denounced the war and the debt made by it as alike unlawful, and though professing to be Democrats, they will answer with one voice that this representation by proxy is right and proper, although they do not even admit the negro to be a citizen, and hardly confess him to be a man. While he continued a slave there was nothing unreasonable in the agreement that the master should speak for him, if he was to be heard at all, because he could have no will of his own. It was at all events the bargain, and we stood by it. That slave is now, however, a free man. He hasa will of his own, and the man who owned him nolonger represents it, but the contrary. Looking to his present relations to the late slave, his assumption of the right to speak for him is a double outrage on the black man. It is not only to deny him a representative, but to give that office to his enemy. It is in effect to ree nslave him. If the white man of the South is of the opinion that the negro is not fit to vote at home, he decides at the same time that he is not worthy to be represented here; and in claiming that right, asks for himself a power in the Government that will make one unrepentant traitor the equal, in many instances, of. 2 or 3 loyal northern men. He admits the injustice, too, while he preserves his consistency, by rejecting the negro himselfin the interior aportionment of some of his own States. But is it just to the loyal States that he should exercise this power in the Federal Government? Will they consent to this inequality, now that the remedv is in their own hands? Are these people to be rated in their condition of subjugation their own estimate before putting their armor on, ” having vindicated their claim to be considered the master race, and so outweigh twice or thrice their number of northern mudsills? Speaking for myself, I do not choose to have my delegated powers as the representative of 130,000 northern free men neutralized by a representative of this sort, whether he come here by the congede lire of a military commander, or is puffed in this direction by the arrogant breath of a feeble but aristocratic constituency. If the white men of the South will insist that the negro shall have no political rights in the States, while he is to appear here to claim a recognition at our hands on y to add to the power of the oligarchy in this Government, then I would insist that he shall appear here either in person, or by his attorne, or curator, or next ricnd, and not by aguar ian or trustee under the apointment of his quondam master, which won (1 be the sublimest of farces. If they are not content with this, then I would say to them, wait until by a constitutional amendment we can offer you the fairer basis of suffrage, which will enable you to swell our numbers as soon as you shall be prepared to do justice to the black man. It is insisted, however, and most especially by those who profit most by the laws of naturalization, an the principle of universal suffrage, of which they have therefore been the unvarying champions, that the negro is ignorant, and must be educated before he can be allowed to enjoy the privileges necessary for his own protcction as a citizenwhich is to say, in effect, that ignorance disqualifies for freedom, and ought to make a man a slave. It may be a question whether it were not well if that had been made a condition with all men. But why demand that of the indigenous black man who has been reared under our institutions, and has perhaps shouldered his musket in their defense, which is not asked of the foreigner whose vote and sympathies have been against us? Is he in ferior in these respects to the Celtic Irishman who holds the destinies of your great metropolis in his hands? His instincts at all eventssupposing them to be his highest facultyhave taught him to take the side of liberty when the savage who burned him was exerting himself in the interests of the goveinin classes of Europe, from whose oppressions hciad sought an asy lum here, to overthrow the very Government which had so eneiously opened its arms to receive him, and lilted him from the dust into the privileges of a citizen. I would take that in stinct, and use it as a counterpoise against the crude, uninstructed element that comes to us from abroad. I do notfear that it will fall under the influence of the aristocratic class any more than it did during the war. The negro will be sure to look with jealousy and suspicion upon the taskMaster from whose arms he has been torn, and who will still continue to regard him as his rightful property. That aristocracy, more over, landless as it is soon destined to be, under another and a better social system, is sure to be swallowed up ere long bY the upheaval of the lower stratum, when labor, now become respectable, shall assert its rightful supremacy, and the strong sinews of toil shall reclaim. their lost inheritance by seizing. upon the soil. But who are they that make this objection? Only the master himself and his northern friends. If the think so, however, wh do they object? what harm can come to the lords from the maintenance of the patriarchal relation, by turning it into a hen of kinship and good offices thatwill rival the constitution of the Highland clan? But they do not think so. They afiirnied with equal confidence that the negro would cleave to his master, and fight for him, if he would fight at all; but it turned out to be a mistake, as every man of common sense knew very well it would. If the power of the master had been equal to that of the northern demagogue, he might possibly have taken sides against the Government with the same una nimity as the imported Caucasian who was led as an ox to the shambles, and made, like a blind Samson, to lay his hands upon the pillars of our constitution in that dark hour when all the powers ofearth and hell seemed leagued together forits destruction. The negro has already solved that question in away that shames even the poor white man of the South, who is indeed obnox ious to this imputation, and from whose example it might have been plausibly inferred,but for the experience of this war, that he would have yielded to the same influences. Butwhat authority is there for the assertion that th black man is more iornnt than the poor whites of the South die delight in shooting, or the imported patriots of the North who gratify their eqnally savage tastes by burning him? Look at the revelations of the census and see what the declare. I venture to so. that, consideringt edifference of conditiondtn opportunity, the black man is no way the in ferior. It is sufficicnt, however, that he has proved intelligent enough to be loyal, when his highly educated master was not saved from trea son hyhis superiorinstruction. But who shall say that this loyalt was the fruit of ignorance? Not those, certain y, who rize the republican State, and think that knowled is essential to its preservation. Its chief advantage is, perhaps, its felicitous adaptation to the General standard ofhumanity in its extreme simplicity of form, and the fact that it requires so little of the learning of the schools to govern it. It would have perished in the recent trial, if it had been left to the wisdom of its statesmen. It was the uneducated common sense, the reasoning instinct only, of its own people, that saved it. God defend us from the statesmen and diplo matist whom this revolution has evolved! But if the negro is ignorant whose fault is it, and what is tire remedy? Has he not been studiously denied the privilege which his white and zealous Democratic rival has so largelyneg lected, of learnin even to read? and is the slaveowner, who is responsible for this, to meet us with the confession that he has purposel kept this man in darkness because e feare that asark might fall upon his intellect that would, indle into flame and melt his chains, and then convert his own in expiable wrong into an argument against his freedom, and ask nsto wait upon the education of the man who has just shown that he is better fitted for its enjoyment than himself? Thank Heaven! it does not require an education in the schools to make a man ove liberty. The whole infernal system of black laws is founded on the dread of human instinct, and the fear that the natural struggles of humanity, if aided even by such feeble lights as might be accessible to him in his condition of servitude, would result in making him a free man. They aic themselves apregnant confession that the slave is gifted with powers and susceptibilities that might be awa ened into mischievous activity, and cultivated for the highest duties of citizenship in a free State. Whether the imorance of the inferior class, either imported5from abroad or thus diligently cultivate at home, ought to constitute a disqualification, it is perhaps too late to inquire, since the policy of the country, shape and fashioned by the Democratic party, has settled it as a principle that the right of selfgovernpment cannot be justly made to depend upon the education orintelligence of the voter. It may be right for the twofold reason that the love of liberty is heavenborn, and the rightto vote the best educator of the free man. 1f Gentlemen on the other side have come now to think differently, I have no objection to go back and trust the suffrageonly to those who can read and write, and have been long enough among us to understand our institutionsto shake themselves loose from all foreign domination to uiilearn the Old World ideas in which they have been rearedand to appreciate the freedom which we enjoy. I cannot consent, however, that one rule shall he a plied to the imported Celt and another to the homebred A rican. The right to freedom is not a question of either race or color, but the common inheritance of humanity. There are no aris tocracies in Gods providence but that of understandin, which is not transmissible bydescent, and which is then anage of no particular race or class of men. do not mean to say tbr I am no fanatic that the negro race is, upon the whole, the equal of the white one in this particular, any more than I would affirm that anyone white race is equal to any other, or thatall the white races are equally fitted for the task of selfgovernment. That is a proposition which no man can confidently affirm, in view of the ast history and present condition of the world, at yet it involves no question as to the natural aspirations, which are only inspirations, of man for freedom or his right to its enjoyment. If I am to choose, however, between these 2 elements, I would take the black man, upon the evidence of the last few years, and reect the equally ignorant white, who is so debauc edas even to love slaverywho allows his very instincts to be smothered and who submits his conscience and his understanding to a direction whose dominion rests upon the same profound and sagacious policy that has locke up the treasures of knowledge from the black man. Everybody must have been struck with the marvelous unanimity with which both these elements arranged themselves, though on opposite sides, in the late contest. When men beginto reason for themselves they are almost sure to differ. “Instinct, ” says Mr. Burke, “when under the guidance of reason is always right.” If it was instinct, however, that led the black man in the one direction it was something other than reason that herded his jealous rivals into one solid mass in the other. But it has been objected in some quarters, that if the negro is endowed with the power of the ballot, he will, under the guidance of the same instinct, combine with his fellows to seize the governments of the rebel States into his own hands. This argument is the very opposite of the one which 1 have just examined, and while the other has only been invented as an apology for refusing the ballot by those who had no fears of the masters influence, has not perhaps been without its weight upon both the northern and the southern mind. Nobody can doubt that in this latitude at least there is a morbid apprehension of what is called negro equality, but really means negro superiority; and it is erha s not unnaturaiir that now that the negro has shown that he will fight, the men who fiiiiched from that ordeal in the hour of our danger, or even those who have been driven like cattle into the armies of the oligarchy, should dread the comparison, and feel that there was nothing now but the denial of the ballot to prevent the black man from asserting his natural superiority over themselves. This apprehension supposes, however, a power of combination an forecast without even the stimulus of oppression on his part, which is anything but consistent with the idea so studi ously inculcated of his incorrigible inferiority, and surrenders all that has been affirmed by philosophers and divines in regard to his nor mal condition, while it admits that even the higher culture of the white man would give him no advantage in the contest. But in the few cases where the blacks are in a majority the difference in numbers is small. If it cannot be overcome by the superior training of the white man, then the ability of the negro and hiseonsequenttitleto command, areestablished by the highest possible test. But in a quarrel of races what is to become of the mulatto? If the least perceptible infusion of negro blood, the very faintest suspicion of a twist in the hair, is sufficient to authorize us to deprive our unfortunate hybrid cousin of all participation in the Government, what assurance is there that the Caucasian flush will not prove equally fatal on the other side? History teaches us that this distinction is as likely to prevail as the other. But surely the chivalry, which has held in sub ordination by its superior address the turbulent but submissive Democracy of the North, would not shrink from the encounter in the same field with the despised and degraded African. But the idea of such a combination, as the result Only of the most generous treatment, is the most extraordinary of paradoxes, if it does not deserve to be characterized as the wildest of chi meras. The people of the South will divide, as before, upon the policy of the Government, and struggle, as before, for the possession of its offices. oth sides, of course, will seek topro pitiate the black man because he has become a power in the State and that one which will secure is confidence, and go farthest in its professions of regard for his interests, will be sure to secure the majority of his votes. If he be a child, as he peraps in some sense truly is, he will be won by kindness, and ask nothing more than freedom of locomotion, protection to hisperson, and the means of enjoying, without mo lestation, the rewards of his own labor. Make it the interest of his late master to cultivate him. Give him a vote, and the “poor white trash” who despised him because he was a slave, will respect him because he is a sovereign. If it is necessary to educate him, because he is ignorant, give him an interest in the Government. It is the only school for the adult, and perhaps the best for all ages. The ripest thinkers of the times are agreed that it is a nur sery of instruction that develops the man with wonderful rapidity, and it is this compensatory power that has perhaps served more than anything else to neutralize the evils of the prevailing system. To insist on a preliminary education is to begin at the wrong end. Leave him for instruction in the handsof his old master, and you offer a premium for the continuance of the old system, which kept him in ignorance of his rights and of his power. Knowledge will make him more formi able than ever. So long as he is kept under the State, and feels that he is no part of it, he is sure never to rise by this process. The men who control the Government will have the same interest in keeping him down as heretofore, ree nforced as it Will be by hantoms of terror that will haunt their pil ows, along with the new feeling of resentment and jealousy which their comulsory enfranchisement has engendered. (gherish not the delusion that any good behavior on his part will ever secure for him an admission to the rights of citizenship. it is now or never. There is no case, I think, in history, where a privileged class has ever surrendered its rerogatives to those that were beneath it. liiidulge not the hope that you will ever iuakc ofhim a contented subject. It is as impossible with a people so numerous to maintain an intermediate grade between the slave and citizen, as it is to establish an intermediate variety in nature, or an intermediate condition here between the State and Territory. The black man knows that he is free. If he asserts his right to meet his follows in council for purposes which touch the interests of his race. either in this world or the next, the rumors of insurrection will load the atmosphere. The white man will restrain his liberty by biting statutes and relentless cruelty. The black man will rebel, and the result will be a chronic war, which will repel the emigrant, and end in the extermination of the weaker race. The groundless panic that pervaded the South so recently foreshadows the evil that is to come. Has the kindred policy of the British Government toward the gellic Irishman succeeded in conciliating his affection for the English race or nation? If those who favor it here had taken the trouble to look into the causes of that exodus thatis unpeopling his ancient home, and flooding our shores with its living tides, they would have discovered that there was something more than a war of races to explain the undyin hatred with which the Irish exile looks upon the Saxon Englishman, and they would have found its solution in the very policy which it is now proposed to inaugurate in order to prevent a war of races in the South. It is unnecessary, however, to go so far. The recent bloody disturbances in the island of Jamaica are but a t pe of the social horrors which a mistaken eference to its prejudices is preparing for that deluded people. But it is o jseted by the President that this is a question for the States under the Constitution, and that the concession of the elective franchise by himself to the freedmen of the South must have been extended to all colored men wherever found, and so must have established achange of suffrage in the North as well as in the South, and would have been an as sumption of power which nothing in the constitution or laws of the U.S. would have warranted. This or umentassumes, in the 1st place, that the defau ting States are already in teUnion, free from the penalties of crime, and with all their rights and privileges as intact as those of their loyal sisters. If this be true, it is not to be questioned that the right of fixing the qualifications of their own voters has been left. submodo, with themselves. But how then, it will be naturally asked, did the President himself acquire the power of defining the qualifications of the voters in the 1st instance? Ifhe could do this if he could either abridge or enlarge the privilegeand he could as well do one as the other so, d mullofortiori, could the lawmaking power of this Government, in which the sovereignty resides. If he could do either, he might as well have conferred the privilege on the black man as on anybody else. But then he objects that this must have extended it to all the loyal States as well as those that have rebelled, which is an assertion that his jurisdiction has attached, by virtue of the rebellion of the delinquents, to the States that are without sin. I am constrained to say that this is an argument which I have not been able to comprehend. Taking it, however, to be true, as claimed, it must have equally followed from his summary disfiaiichisement of the voters, whether loyal or disloyal, who might decline to take the oath to support all proclamations and laws having reference to the emancipation of the slave, that we of the loyal States were all disfranchised, too, unless we submitted to the same conditions. Taking it, however, only in the milder sense of a sugflcstion, not uncommon in the South, that the Toyal States which now deny the suffrage to the black man, would be either expected to save their own consistencyor might be compelled by Congress to conform to the same rule, there is a word more to be said in the way of answer. Whether these States could be regarded as strictly republican with such a limitation of the elective franchise, if the necessities of the country or the protection of a numerous class of citizens required the presentation of the question to the consideration of Congress, is more than doubtful. The paucity of the blacks, however, in the northern States, where there is no disposition to oppress them, and their uniform enjoyment, without molestation, of every social and civil right, without the protection of the political privilege of the ballot, has made it a question of no practical importance to the country, and led to no formal complaint. although the overshadowin influence of the slave power has robbed them in many of the States of that privilege which the overthrow of slavery will sooner or later restore tothem. Whethertheir inherent right as citizens to vote could be enforced by an appeal to the judicial tribunals of the country, upon the footing of the constitutional guarantee, is question which I am not prepared to answer, an do not care to discuss. There is no issue now as to the loyal States to demand the consideration of Congress. There is none ending as to their admission here. It is only tecriminals that are at your bar, not asking pardon, but demanding to be restored to power. The went out to found a slave cin pire. They stilfthink that God and nature intended the negro only for that condition. He counts by millions in the rebel States. He is a free man now. His master is his enemy. He obviously intends to reenslave him if he can. He wants power to enable him to do it. The negro wants protection, and has earned the right to it, if it was not his before. We want peace and security, if not indemnity for the past, and we are sure that they can he only secured by making these governments republican. They have placed themselves by their own act in a condition in which, by the confession of the President himself, it becomes our duty to execute the guarantees of the constitution. When we shall have done this work it will heme enough to enter upon another that will be purely voluuta; and if the reconstructed States shall insist, when they are in a condition to do so, that we shall deal with the negro ourselves as We have compelled them to eal with him, I doubt not that the justice of the North, with its vision purged by the rising beams of universal liberty, will anticipate any action here, by undoing what nothing but a base servility to the perished feudalism of the South could ever have accomplished. But why hurry the return of theseStates? Why undertake the hopeless and preposterous task ofresorting not only to temptation, butcompulsion, for the purpose of bringing about a reunion which can on y subsist where it is spon taneous, and can rest securely on no other foundation than mutual respect and good will? It is agreat problem, and a iificult one. Is there any immediate overshadowin necessity for their reappearance here? Is there any adequateinducement to indemnify us for the admitted risks we must incur from immature and illconsidered action? What would be thought of the sanity of the man in private life who would insist on hurrying back to his embrace and confidence the unfaithful partner who had violated a sworn engagement of fidelity, purloinedhis goods, fired his dwelling, and murdered a part of its defenders; who instead of yielding had only been surrendered by his slaves, or overtaken and disarmed by the officers of justice, and had never even admitted his crime, or given one token of repentance? Is there not danger enough already in the rapid process of disbandment and surrender that has been going on under our own eyes, to the terror ofour only loyal friends, both white and black, in the Seat, without reference to the wishes or opinions of the people or their representatives here, and in defiance of officia information collected by the Government itself that the spirit which inaugurated and directed this hellish revolt was as rife as ever in the land, thatwe should insist on strewing palm branches in their way, and inviting them to the honors of a triumph at the Capitol? The president admits that his policy “ is attended with some risk, ” but excuses it by the suggestion that “it isarisk thatmust be taken.” This, I humbly think, is a nonscquitur. It was not necessary that he should have apolicy, and a perilous one, or thatwe should take the risks that are admitted to be incidental to it. However it may be with the soldier, it is not out of “the nettle danger" that the statesman would “ pluck the flower safety.” He will take no risks if he can help it, and with only a rational treatment of this question, I thin they are unnecessary here. he people of the loyal States, who fought this battle, are now in the possession of the Government. They may and if they are wise they willtake their own time to determine how they will readjust its machinery, and heal over the wounds that the war has made. It is in their power now to exact every possible security for the future. Why, then, this inexplicable eagerness to surrender all the advantage of our victory without any security at all? hy insist that the overthrow of these rebelsiu the bloody arbitrament to which they have appealed, is to be only the signal for their restoration to their former estate? Is it necessary that we should constrain the reluctant condescension of these haughty masters, who so lately spurned us as slaves, to the renewal of the domination which they had come to loathe from a very feeling of satiety? Has the attempt improved or mollified them? General Schurz is the witness that the policy of not only pardoning, but inviting the traitors themselves to reconstruct their States, has had the worst possible effect upon them and it was but natural that it should. If they do not des ise us for our weakness and our voluntary selabasement, they will be at least prepared to conclude that they are more necessary to us than we are to them. They were not long out themselves, before they began to yearn for the scion some royal house beyond the seas. Shall vi urnish them reason to think that we are Did, or the return of our natural lords, along with our Democratic brethren, who have been wandering like sheep without a shepherd, and lamenting the desolation of the Ca itol with more than the tenderness of the L oor, who we t the exile of the last of the Abencerrages under the deserted towers of the Alhambra? What reason beyond their mere repugnance to the association with the northern mudsills, will they have to lament their failure in the battle field, when they are once more reinstated in their " original dominion here? Are these the means by which a statesman expects to improve the lessons of the war? If kindness and submission could have won their hearts, they never would have left us. Is anybod weak enough now to think that they are so o astened an humbled by defeat that a restoration to power, instead of intoxicating, would only disarm them? That would not be in accordance with human nature or historical example. Did the catastrophe of Charles I result in any improvement of the family? Their restoration was but the prelude to another revolution that drove them from the throne. It is the same blind confidence in the reformation of these men that is now menacing this Government with ruin. But is there any evidence that they are changed, or that they are yet in a properframe of mind to come back and perform faithfully their duties here? We all know better. The special commissioner of the Executive says not, and his testimony is supported by all the presumptions in the case. t would be unreason able to look for anything else. They are but men, like ourselves. Alienated in affection by a systematic education of 30 years, they went out with the determination never to return. The southern heart went with them. Inflated with pride and vainglory, they threw down the gage of battle, and defied us in the presence of a world that sympathized with them. We took it u, and they are at our feet, deeply wounded in their most sensitive point, smarting under the humiliation of a defeat at the hands of their own slaves, and realizing more than the bitterness of death in the deth of the ir fall, and the painful recollections that it suggests. How unreasonable to expect that hatred, the deep est and most undyingdoubly intensified by such humiliations could be converted into love by such a process, and the lessons of a generation unlearned in the twinklin of an eye! But they do not even affect it; an I am rather in clined to respect the pride that, under the greatest oftemptations, has prevented them from condescending to the meanness of the hypocrite. They confess that they are subdued, but only, as they tell us, by the power of numbers the mere brute superiority of the North. They do not profess contrition for their great crime. They o not even admit that they have sinned. Nay, they glory in the act, treat fidelity to their infamous confederacy as the most heroic of virtues, award public honors under the ver Government that has crushed themand which that Government ratifiesin recompense for treason against it, and visit the social ban, if not the bullet or the knife, upon such of their people as have fought valiantly in its defense. this but reasonable, I say, that, coming as they do, out of the fires of the rebellion, they should feel thus. But that they should act thus under our own eye, is evidence either that the do not wish to return, or that the dejection that followed their defeat has given place to the assurance that they are not only to be pardoned their offense, but to return as conquerors. Their leaders certainly do desire to get back again, because they are overthrown in battle, and it is but to exchange the place of a subject for that of a ruler, or at least an equal. To accomplish this they would have been glad to ransom their lives and property for the cheap consideration of negro suffrage. They expected probabl no terms more favorable. The lenity of the government has assured them that treason is no crime, and that there is to be no atonement for the past. The tone of the proclamations and the tenor of the diplomatic negotiations have taught them that nothing was expected or deired by the President but the recognition of the freedom of the slave, and the repudiation of the debt incurred in carrying on the war, and that there was to be no other security for the future. The outgivings of public functionaries have instructed them that they were wrong in claiming the rights of belligerents, and that they have a right to resume their places here upon such conditions as they can make with the Executive. They care nothing about you or your laws. They look only to the Chief Magistrate, while they defy the opinions of your constituents, and regard you only as the mere executors of his will. There is a providence in these manifestations that warns us of our danger if we would give heed to it. Ignoring them, we shall not have even the poor apology of saying that we were deceived in a case where even the largest professionsif they had vouchsafed to make them, as they have notought not to have been allowed to put us ofl" our guard. I know that confidence is a generous plant, and that there are natures so unsophisticated as to be above suspicion or, distrust. There are men certainly whose boundi less charity would not only forgive offenses, however frequently repeated, but even persuade them to give their faith anew to those who have dealt treacherously with themas these men have with uswhile they would reject the counsels of the wise and prudent, on the ground that their suspicions were ungener ous, and the results apprehended by them improbable. These men maybe good Christians. but they are poor statesmen, and they miscon strue the spirit of the Christian maxim which teaches forgiveness, if they suppose that it in culcates trust. The thing that has once happened may happen again. It is not sufficient that it is improbable. It is the business of the statesman to see that it is made impossible. No blind confidence, no false sense of security on his own part, will excuse him for hazarding the peace and welfare of a nation by giving his trust a 2nd time where it has once been disastrously betrayed. He has no right to sport in this way with the life of a people, He cannot afford to be thus generous With other peoples goods. It is not enough to tell us that the present Executive of this nationwith a stron feeling, of course, for the desolation of the Sout is magnaniine us enough to forgive, and gener ous enough to confidein the honorand loyalty of his old neighbors and associates in council, although they have so cruelly persecuted himas they will do again as soon as the opportunity occurs. The 20 millions of the loyal States whohave seen solittle good come out of that Naz areth must have something surer to rest upon than his oblivious charity. I think other wtse, and so do my constituents. I have eat repect for his opinions, but the facts an the presumptions are all against him, and I must be governed by them. If we are wrong, the error may be corrected hereafter. If he is wrong, it is irremediable. True wisdom demands that we should “make assurance doubly sure, and take a bond of fate, ” while thereis yet time to do it, by providing against all possible contin gencies, where the interests involved are so vast and inappreciable. If the terms seem harsh, that is the fault of those who are precipitating the solution. A reasonable probation would enable us to make them easier. I would rather, for my own part, trust to the mellowin influences of time. Ifyou desire a reunion that will be permanent and real, you must wait till their hearts are changedwait until the bitterness of defeat is past, and until they are prepared to confess their errors, and ask forgiveness, and restoration in the spirit of the returning prodifial. Without repentance forgiveness is idle, ndrestoration worse. Philosoph and religion alike approve the soundness of this doctrine. You cannot accomjilish a task of this sortby any forcing process. o wise Government would think of it. No sound or judicious statesman would advise it. If they cannot come back now in the right spirit, and will not come with such securities as we have a right to demand it were better theyshould not come at all. iwould hold them as they aresud with black troops 1866. 797 tOountil their territories are peoled by men who will recognize the value of the Union ay, hold them forever, if necessary, as subject provinces. Butit willnotbe necessary. They will be glad to return in a very few years on just such conditions as you may impose, and will be grateful for the privilege. A mit them now, and withdraw your armies, and you leave your few white friends and your multitudine us black ones to an ostracism as merciless as the bloody prescription upon which they can no longer venture with safety. They tell you so themselves. While the President informs you that these States, or some of them. are ready to return, in the face of the admitted fact that their people, in almost every instance. have refused to ratify even the advantageous bargain made with him by theirleaders, by sending loyal men to represent them here, every breeze from the Sout is laden with the earnest remonstrances of the loyal people of those States, telling you that the withdrawal of our power will be the signal for their flight an exile from their homes and altars, from the Graves of their kindred and their household gods and beseeehing you, in piteous accents of despair and agony, not to abandon them to their remorseless enemies. But before they do come in, whether by the door or window, there are duties to be performed to others, dangers arrainst which we must provide. arising out of the obligations of the war that these men have forced upon us. we have incurred an enormous debt that is mainl owing to our own people. We must provide for the payment of its interest, as well as the redemtion of all the pledges we have made to the isabled soldier, and to the widows and orphans of those who have er ished in the field. Is it expected that these men will assist us in redeeming these obligations, that some persons are so anxious to associate them with us in the performance of this work of justice and mercy? Do you propose to summon these great criminals here and translate them from the dock to the bench, as joint assessors with yourselves, and those who have poured out their money or their blood in ocean streams in bringing them to justice, in the resettlement of the nation, in perfectingits secu rities, and in fulfilling the obligations you have incurred to the public creditor, and to the families of those brave men who have gone down to death upon so many southern battlefields? Will you insist that they shall come into council with you on such a question as this? The ordeal would be too severe. They have denounced the war as not only nurighteous, but unlawful; and they are not alone in this particular. It is not the rebels militant only, the men who so cheerfully staked their lives on their opinions, who think so. Their old associates in the North, whowantthembackon the terms of the President, have taught their followers here upon the same argument, that the public securities were worthless and would be repudiated. Is, there no risk of a new coalition on this basis? I venture to predict that the next phase of the reunited Democracy of the North and South, (for it will be a reunion of the party and not of the States) will be opposition to the payment of this debt. It may not discover itself at once in the shape of absolute repudiation in the North, but this nGv alliance will find other means, not less effective, to accomplish its work. The South, with all its prejudices and ride, would rather consent even to negro suffrage than allow itself to be taxed for such a purpose, and you cannot comel it without the aid of the black man. vThe orth will insist, at least, on scaling your securities down by the actual money value in the worlds market of the paperthatwas invested in them. It will damage your credit by quarreling with your schemes of revenue. Throwing that taxation is always unpopular, and particularly amonga people so unused to it as ourselves, it will at least flatter and delude the multitude with illusory promises of relief, and with the aid of a united South, will at the next turn of the cards, win its way bac to power, and enter once more upon the possession of thelGovernment. But the mischief will not end here. There is another debt that numbers cannot comute, incurred in the buflled attempt to overt row this Union, and diffused throughout the entire South. There is, besides, a claim yet dormant for the value of the slaves made free by the proclamation. It may seem to some extrava gant to talk of these, butit is no more extrava gant than many other things that we have witnessed, and among them the assertion of a right to return to these Halls as though they had not sinned, and the presumptuous arro gance that has already taken our constitution in charge, and undertaken to arraign our acts of selfdefense against their treason as violations of that instrument. Admit these men, ignore their crimes by your votes here, give them your confidence and the eventual mastery as before, and your public credit will deservedly receive a shock that will tumble it into ruins. readmit them here, and every prudent man will endeavor to get rid of your securities. NO sharpsighted moneylender will trust a Government so administered. It will be in vain for you to profess in JtResolutions that you do not intend to pay any of the debt of the dead confederacy, or of the claims of the living slave holder. The world will not believe it. Itwill say you mockit, when the makers of that debt, and the disloyal slaveholder himself, shall be exalted by your votes into legislators, to cooperate with the party here that has decried your Obligations, and declared them to be worth less. The assumption by you of the one, and the payment of the other, would be but a logical sequence. If the makers of that debt are decidedto be worthy of honor and trust in this Government, it will be an esto pel against the assertion that there was anyt in essentially immoral in hiring assassins to ta e our lives, or anything in reason to prevent the payment of the wages of their iniquity. It wifllie taken for grafited that when you make a legislator of the criminal, you intend to pay his debts of honor at home. You may protest that you do not, but it will point you tot ese acts, and scoff, ay, it will scoff, at your empty protestations, as no more than sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. But before I have done, allow me to come back once more to the great conflict of power the gigantic and overshadowing issue which has been forced on us and on the country, by the process of restoration which it has pleased the resident in the exercise of his own judgment to adopt. There are other considerations that deman our care beyond the mere rehabil itation of the conquered States. It is forus to see thatin the execution of the guarantee the federal Republic itself shall receive no detriment, and undergonochange. Therearesymptomsun questionably ofan alarminguature, developed, of course, by the high stimulus underwhich it has just been working. that forebode a serious disturbance of its balancesa revolution equiva lent to a change in its organic structure, if not watched narrowly before it is too late. The time has now come to check those tendencies which a condition so unnatural has so largely encouraged. With a Union newly and doubly imperiled by a policy that, ignoring the sentiment of the loyal States, has thrust us an immeasurable distance back from the position which we occu ied when the campfires of our legions were h azing along the heights of the Appomattox, by not only leaving treason and murder to go unpunished, but warming the former into life and hope and strength by with drawing our troops, and endowing it with the power of reorganizing its broken columns for a fresh assault, and with the great problem of the restoration of its dissevered members complicated with another and crhapsa greater, in the tremendous question whether all these het erogeneous elements are to be flung into the cru cible, and fused down under the fierce flames of war into an elective monarchy, it seems to me, with all due respect to the President, that we have reached a crisis in our affairs when it beh00ves the people to look to their securities, and their Representatives here to resume the government of this nation, and to sayto the advancing tide “thus far and no further.” Standing as I do upon the traditions of the fathers, upon the radical but conservative maxims of republican liberty, upon the great principles that have been consecrated by the struggles of more than 200 years, I cannot but tremble for my country when, in addition to all this, I hear the national Representatives instructed by other than their lawful masters in regard to their duties here; when I find myself semiofficially advised by the executive head, who has just been thanked by a rebel Legislature for the act, that amendments to its fundamental law, proposed by its delegates here for its security, are unnecessary, or inadmissible, or entitled to no more respect than the resolutions of a town meeting, while bills that have passed this House, and are now actually depending in the Senate, are made the subject of public discourse and animadversion at the other end of the avenue; when I hear a high officer of that Dept confessing and justifying the exercise of a dispensing power over our laws, in the employment of traitors and the payment, to them of moneys wrung from the sweat of the toiling millions of the loyal North; when I see members of both these Houses ready and anxious at such a time to abdicate their right ful power as a Legislature. not by a harm ess reference to a committee of their own bodies but by championing their own disability, and flinging down their crowns at the footstool of executive power; when I hear on this floor, from men who opposed the War throughout, and now, by a logic which I do not question, support the policy that gives the victory to the enemy, the appeal of the people to their own Congress compared to the owls of a drunken populace at the doors of the revolutionary Assembl of France, that in the name of liberty floo edits capital with blood, and in the name of religion dethroned the monarch of the world; when I read in newspapers controlled by gentlemen of this House whto have discerned no sensibility to attacks upon its own privileges, the mere assertion of a right on its part to express an opinion in regard to the disposition of ourtroops. with no organized enemy in the field, denounced as an invasion of the rerogative; when I hear even the suggestion of the nations sentiment in regard to the appropriate doom of the traitor chiefs, who now stand impeached before the world of a conuivance in the starvation of our soldiers, and the butchery of our President, reprobated in the same way by public journals in the confidence of the Government; and when, to crown all, my own vision is blasted by appeals to the Executive from the disloyal papers of the North, to employ that atrona e which the loyal people have alone Bestowe on him to coerce their Representatives into submission to his views, and, failing that, to enact the T610of another Cromwell or Napoleon in this Capitol, while an answering shout comes back upon the southern breeze that the bayonets of the soldiery, who flung that despotism to the earth must be invoked to reinstate it here. I think [am no alarmist. Iam not apt to indulge in gloomy augurics in to the future of a nation that has outlivreegarsdo many blunders, and been so often ransomed by an Almighty arm. The proverbial honors of a prephet of evil have no attractions for me. Poesy has told us the story of Cassandra. History has vouchsafed to hand down to us the name and fate of the madman who ran up and down the streets of Jerusalem crying “Woe! woe!” while the armies of Titus. were encamped about its walls. But ifI stood alone on this floor, and it were myJost utter ance, holdin the high trust which God had given me, with a nation in travail, and in view of the dark portents that cloud the horizon, and shake the very atmosphere around us, I would say to the people, “Awake from your false security, or prepare yourselves for another holocaust. Your enemy still lives. His impaired vitality has been restored. Redhanded treason rears its headas proudly and defiantly and insultingly asbefore, It menaces your win its way within your walls. if capital. It claims to dictate to your President. It presumes to use the very organs of your Government to denounce your attitude as a revolutionary one, and to arraign your servants here as though they were in rebelion against the South. It moves upon the citadel where your defenders are intrenched. See that no warder sleeps, no port is left unguarded. Look to it that no sentinel unbnrs your gates. Steel the hearts of your defenders against the weakness that would betray like treason. See that their mail is proof no joint agape, no rivet out of place. See that no Trojan horse, no Tennessee with fair out side, but big with pestilence and war, shall When these great criminals do return, if ever, let it be only through the door that you shall indicate, and with such infrangible and irreversible securities as you only have the right to demand.” This is my position. Here have taken my stand, and by the help of God I will maintain it to the end. others may falter in the trial, but through me no right shall be abridged, no privilege surrendered, no single leaf plucked, no jewel torn from the crown of the representative body. On motion of Mr. COOK, (at 5 oclock p. m.) the House adjourned till Monday.