Mr. FOSTER. While the gentleman is insisting upon the rights of the States, he will not forget that it is perfectly competent for a State to make a law declaring that there shall be no legal process at all in the courts of that State to compel payment of a debt hereafter to be contracted. The States beyond a doubt may make iaws which shall entirely prevent the suing of parties for debt, and leave every man to make a contract on his own risk, trusting to the honor of his debtor to pay him or not. Now, suppose any State has such a law at the Present time, and we judicially, Senatorially, have no means of knowing but that some States now exempt all the property of debtors from legal process for the payment of debts. In effect it is done where it is provided that household furniture and the homestead comprising a certain number of acres of land shall be exempt from all liability. This is the law in some States, and where that law exists the Senator claims that it is a perfectly valid law which we must not disturb. If that is all the property that the man has got, and it may be jo. by the law of the State all that man's property is exempt from legal process to compel payment of a debt. The gentleman insists that that is the law. I insist that the State has a right to make the law that there shall be no legal process to compel the payment of a debt. If that were the case we should have this singular spectacle, according to the gentleman's doctrine: that a bankrupt law would be uniform when in some States debts could be collected by law and in others they could not be collected by law; because the gentleman says the question is simply, what are the assets of a bankrupt within this State. If by law he has no assets that can be applied for the payment of his debts, under the law there is o: to distribute in that State. I was saying, Mr. President, that the Senfrom Nevada was making the claim, in effect, that a man might be worth an independent for tune in one State and his property be protected from all legal process for the payment of debts, and another man worth but a pittance in another State would be compelled to part with a portion of that pittance to pay his debts under the same law, and that a uniform law. I confess I am unable to see any uniformity in such a law. I do see a want of uniformity between a law which in one State leaves a man inde orich and exonerates him from all ebt, and takes all but a given amount in another State for the payment of his debts. There is no uniformity in that that I can see. The gentleman can see no want of similarity between the law of lien in some States created by an attachment which he calls a grab law and this Present proposed law. The difference, Mr. President, may be shortly stated thus: that what he calls the grab law is a mode by law of appropriating a man's property for the payment of his debts; the other is an o:of his own property to himself for his own benefit, putting his creditors at defiance. The one is all for the debtor's benefit; he holds it for himself, no matter how much, and his creditors may whistle for their claim; the other compels him to give up his property, except such an amount as the law holds to be necessary for his subsistence, for the benefit of his creditors. There is a difference, to me, in these 2 cases. Why, sir, this very bill, on page 17, beginning at o 27th line, has this clause: And such other property not included in the fore going exceptionsas is exemptedfrom levy and sale upon execution by the laws of the State in bankrupt which the has his domicile at the time of the commencementof the proceedings in bankruptcy, to an aemxeomupnttionnot exceeding that allowed by such State laws in forcein the year 1864. Several States have altered their laws since 1864 on this subject, and of course the law in those States would not be uniform in its application; so that within the same State . would be a lack of uniformity under this bill, as well as all over the U.S. There would be no uniformity in any 2 States out of the 36, and in many instances there would be a lack of uniformity within the same State; and yet the gentleman says the bill is uniform, because it distributes the assets of the bankrupt alike, when in the one case he has assets to an immense amount which cannot be touched, and in the other all can be touched down to a very small amount. The very gist of the whole matter is, what are the assets? The whole case turns on that, what are the assets? There may be millions in one case and no assets over $200 in the other, and that is uniformity