d which the dissolving
remnants of the Democratic party in this hall are called upon to
rally, inscribed with no great sentiment of justice or generosity, but
bearing upon its folds the miserable appeal of the demagogue, 'This is
a white man's Government?' When you inaugurate your newly-discovered
political principle, do not forget to invite the colored troops; beat
the assembly; call out the remnants of the one hundred and eighty
thousand men who marched with steady step through the flames and
carnage of war, and many of whom bear upon their bodies the honorable
scars received in that unparalleled struggle and in your defense, and
as you send your banner down the line, say to them, 'This is the
reward of a generous country for the wounds you have received and the
sufferings you have endured.'

"Shall we follow the great law to which I have referred--the law that
liberty is progress--and conform our policy to the spirit of that
great law? or shall we, governed by unreasonable and selfish
prejudices, initiate a policy which will make this race our hereditary
enemy, a mine beneath instead of a buttress to the edifice which you
are endeavoring to repair? Sir, I do not hesitate to say that, in my
opinion, it were better to follow where conscience and justice point,
leaving results to a higher Power, than to shrink from an issue which
it is the clear intention of Providence we shall face, or to be driven
from our true course by the chimeras which the excited imaginations of
political partisans have conjured up, or by the misty ghosts of
long-buried errors."

Mr. Van Horn, of New York, while willing to accept the bill as
originally presented, preferred it as modified by Mr. Hale's
amendments. In his speech he charged those who had opposed the bill as
laboring in the interest of slavery.

"They seem to have forgotten," he said, "in their advocacy of slavery,
that we have passed through a fierce war, begun by slavery, waged
against the Government by slavery, and solely in its interest to more
thoroughly establish itself upon the Western Continent, and crush out
the best interests of freedom and humanity; and that this war, guided
on our part by the omnipotent arm of the Invisible, made bare in our
behalf, has resulted in a most complete overthrow of this great wrong;
and by the almost omnipotent voice of the republic, as now expressed
in its fundamental law, it has no right to live, much less entitled to
the right of burial