Mr. COWAN. Mr. President, I am very sorry the honorable Senfrom Connecticut has not been able to agree with me on this subject, for certainly there is no member of this body for whose opinions at all times I entertain higher respect, and none with whom when I agree I feel so well assured of being right. I am also pleased, on the other hand, that what I may have said has induced that honorable Senator to give his views upon this point. if I have one thing to suggest to m rethren above all others, which i.wis to impress upon them, it is that they ponder well i.speech to which they have just listened. The honorable Senfrom Connecticut has depicted the of the introducing to this great privilege, the ballot, of large masses of ignorant people. He has shown the consequences which have heretofore happened to the country from allowing such classes of people to exercise the franchise. He has told you. Mr. President, that to this the laterebellion has been owing. He has told you that it is attributed to the fact that the masses of the southern people were so entirely ignorant that they were to. led away into rebellion by am bitious leaders, and that thus were brought upon the country such perils as it has recently undergone. If that be true, if such consequences follow from conferring the elective franchise on people of this character, is it not the plainest proposition imaginable that if you undertake to set up any barrier, that if you undertake to correct the evil which you anticipate, if you undertake to guard against that which you say has happened, and which will most likely happen again, your barrier, ought to be effective, it ought to be that which would restrain, that which would keep back and limit. There is where I differ with the honorable Senfrom Connecticut. He says that to provide that the voter shall read and write his own name is such a barrier, that with that we may be secure; What if, for instance the confederate in grey had een universally able to read and write his name therefore we should have had no rebellion, therefore John C. Calhoun would have had no followers, the doctrine of nullification would have had no advocates, the doctrine of seces. would have had no disciples, the doctrine of primary State allegiance would have had no argument. Mr. President, I have very great and very grave doubts about all these things. The conclusion he arrives at is to me a nonsequitur Whether the southern masses could read and write their names, or whether they could read and write and whether they were intelligent generally, I am by no o means preto say that?il these things would not have happened, perhaps happened in greater intensity than they have happened. I am not so certain that all these doctrines, pernicious as they have been, plausible as they were, for tified as they were by argument, by logic, and by, perhaps, the highest form of skill and learning in statesmanship, would not have been worse if the constituency had been as intelligent as that of the honorablo Senfrom Connecticut. But, sir, when he proposes here to vote for a bill to give the right of suffrage to men far lower even than the confederate masses, men who had condescended to be the slaves and the servants for 100s of years of that same people; when he proposes to confer the right of suffrage upon them, and to expose us to "all the dangers which he alleges are sure to follow this kind of ignorant constituency I say, when he proposes to do that, and then has set up this barrier of being able to read and write a man's own name as a sufficient protection, I cannot agree to it.