."

Mr. Hotchkiss opposed the bill as amended. "If you allow this bill to
go into operation as it now stands," said he, "without making any
amendment of its provisions, and permit these elections to be held, as
they must necessarily be held under this bill, under the authority,
control, and regulation of the rebel governments in those States,
there will be no security whatever, and you will have the elections in
New Orleans held under the control of Mayor Monroe and the mob which
he used to such fell purpose last summer. That is the entertainment to
which this bill invites us.

"I regard this as a flank movement," said Mr. Bromwell, "by which is
to be brought about that darling scheme of certain politicians--universal
amnesty and universal suffrage. Whether it end in universal suffrage
or not, one thing is certain, it is universal amnesty."

"It would be emphatically," said Mr. Donnelly, "a government of
rebels. I say a government of rebels, because although the amendment
which has reached us from the Senate contains the words, 'Except such
as may be disfranchised for participation in the rebellion,' that
disfranchisement has to come from the rebels themselves, and surely
there is no man upon this floor weak enough to suppose that they will
so disfranchise themselves."

Mr. Le Blond opposed both bills. Of the one before the House, he said:
"This bill is quite as infamous, quite as absurd, as the bill that the
distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania, [Mr. Stevens,] who is
Chairman of the Committee on Reconstruction, contends for and hangs so
tenaciously to. It confers all the powers that that bill gives; it
confers all the powers that the most radical could claim
consistently."

"I shall content myself," said Mr. Eldridge, "with denouncing this
measure as most wicked and abominable. It contains all that is
vicious, all that is mischievous in any and all of the propositions
which have come either from the Committee on Reconstruction or from
any gentleman upon the other side of the House."

"If you do not take this bill," said Mr. Delano, "although in all its
parts it does not suit you, what are you likely to give the American
people? Nothing. I will not return to my constituents admitting that I
have failed to try to do something in this great trial of the nation.
It is not for rebels that I legislate; it is not for the right of
those who have sought to destroy this Government that I extend mercy;
but it is for