adual and voluntary emancipation,
which would go hand in hand with education and enfranchisement. They
never peered into the bloody epoch when four million fetters would be
at once melted off in the fires of war. They never saw such a vision
as we see. Four millions, each a Caspar Hauser, long shut up in
darkness, and suddenly led out into the full flash of noon, and each,
we are told, too blind to walk, politically. No one foresaw such an
event, and so no provision was made for it. The three-fifths rule gave
the slaveholding States, over and above all their just representation,
eighteen Representatives beside, by the enumeration of 1860.

"The new situation will enable those States, when relationships are
resumed, to claim twenty-eight Representatives beside their just
proportion. Twenty-eight votes to be cast here and in the Electoral
College for those held not fit to sit as jurors, not fit to testify in
court, not fit to be plaintiff in a suit, not fit to approach the
ballot-box! Twenty-eight votes to be more or less controlled by those
who once betrayed the Government, and for those so destitute, we are
assured, of intelligent instinct as not to be fit for free agency!

"Shall all this be? Shall four million beings count four millions, in
managing the affairs of the nation, who are pronounced by their
fellow-beings unfit to participate in administering government in the
States where they live, or in their counties, towns, or precincts; who
are pronounced unworthy of the least and most paltry part in local
political affairs? Shall one hundred and twenty-seven thousand white
people in New York cast but one vote in this House, and have none but
one voice here, while the same number of white people in Mississippi
have three votes and three voices? Shall the death of slavery add
two-fifths to the entire power which slavery had when slavery was
living? Shall one white man have as much share in the Government as
three other white men merely because he lives where blacks outnumber
whites two to one? Shall this inequality exist, and exist only in
favor of those who without cause drenched the land with blood and
covered it with mourning? Shall such be the reward of those who did
the foulest and guiltiest act which crimsons the annals of recorded
time? No, sir; not if I can help it."

Two other modes of meeting the case had been considered by the
committee, namely: _First_, To make the basis of representation in
Congress an