, and should have no mourners in the land or going
about the streets. Such speeches as those of the gentlemen from New
Jersey, [Mr. Rogers,] and from Pennsylvania, [Mr. Boyer,] and my
colleague and friend, [Mr. Chanler,] who represents, with myself, in
part, the Empire State, carry us back to the days and scenes before
the war, when slavery ruled supreme, not only throughout the land, by
and through its hold upon power, which the people in an evil hour had
given it, but here in these halls of legislation, where liberty and
its high and noble ends ought to have been secured by just and equal
laws, and the great and paramount object of our system of government
carried out and fully developed. They seem to forget that liberty and
good government have been on trial during these five years last past
of war and blood, and that they have succeeded in the mighty struggle.
They forget that Providence, in a thousand ways, during this fierce
conflict, has given us evidence of his favor, and led us out of the
land of bondage into a purer and higher state of freedom, where
slavery, as an institution among us, is no more. Why do they labor so
long and so ardently to resurrect again into life this foul and
loathsome thing? Why can not they forget their former love and
attachments in this direction, and no longer cling with such undying
grasp to this dead carcass, which, by its corruptions and rottenness,
has well nigh heretofore poisoned them to the death? Why not awake to
the new order of things, and accept the results which God has worked
out in our recent struggle, and not raise the weak arm of flesh to
render null and void what has thus been done, and thus attempt to turn
back the flow of life which is overspreading all, and penetrating
every part of the body politic with its noble purposes and exalted
hopes?"

Thursday, January 18, was the last day of the discussion of this
important measure in the House of Representatives. When the subject
was in order, Mr. Clarke, of Kansas, "as the only Representative upon
the floor of a State whose whole history had been a continual protest
against political injustice and wrong," after having advocated the
bill by arguments drawn from the history of the country and the record
of the negro race, remarked as follows: "This cry of poverty and
ignorance is not new. I remember that those who first followed the Son
of man, the Savior of the world, were not the learned rabbis, not the
enlightened s