should be preparing itself with grave-clothes for a decent exit from the world; - concessions revolting to the humanity, the conscientious convictions, the religion, and the patriotism of the free States."

Sir, I speak to-day in the spirit of these words, uttered nearly twelve years ago, and verified by time. A small band of men in Congress then braved public opinion, the ruling influences of the time, and every form of proscription and intimidation, in standing by the cause which was overwhelmingly voted down. But although outvoted, it was not conquered. "It is in vain," says Carlyle, "to vote a false image true. Vote it, and revote it, by overwhelming majorities, by jubilant unanimities, the thing is not so; it is otherwise thanso, and all Adam's posterity, voting upon it till doomsday, cannot change it."

The history of reform bears unfailing witness to this truth. The cause which bore the cross in 1850, wears the crown to-day. "No power can die that ever wrought for truth," while the political graves of recreant statesmen are eloquent with warnings against their mistakes. Where are those Northern statesmen who betrayed liberty in 1820? They are already forgotten, or remembered only in their dishonor. Who now believes that any fresh laurels were won in 1850, by the great men who sought to gag the people of the free States and lay the slab of silence on those truths which to-day write themselves down, along with the guilt of slavery, in the flames of civil war? Has any man in the whole history of American politics, however deeply rooted his reputation or God-like his gifts, been able to hold dalliance with slavery and live? I believe the spirit of liberty is the spirit of God, and if the giants of a past generation were not strong enough to wrestle with it, can the pigmies of the present? It has been beautifully said of Wilberforce, that he "ascended to the throne of God with a million of broken shackles in his hands, as the evidence of a life well spent." History will take care of his memory; and when our own bleeding country shall again put on the robes of peace, and freedom shall have leave to gather up her jewels, she will not search for them among the political fossils who are now seeking to spare the rebels by pettifogging their cause in the name of the Constitution, while the slave power is feeling for the nation's throat. No; God is not to be mocked. Justice is sure. The defenders of slavery and its despicable apologists will be nailed to the world's pillory, and the holiest shrines in the temple of American liberty will be reserved for those who shall most faithfully do battle against this rebellion, as a gigantic conspiracy against the rights of human nature and the brotherhood of our race.

THE REBELLION THE MISTAKES OF THE

PAST THE DUTY OF THE PRESENT.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, FEBRUARY 18, 1863.

[This general review of the political and military situation forms an interesting chapter in the history of the times covered by it, while its remorseless arraignment of "Democratic policy was based upon facts supplied by the investigations of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, of which Mr. Julian was a member. This committee rendered the country a real and great service, and is understood to have been largely instrumental in superseding General McClellan, and in inaugurating the more vigorous policy of the war which followed.]

MR. SPEAKER, -The line of argument I propose to pursue during the hour which belongs to me is general in its character, and will not specially refer to the measure now pending before the House. It will not, however, be found substantially irrelevant to the subject; and as I have already waited several weeks for the floor, and the widest latitude has thus far been allowed in this debate, I trust I shall be permitted to proceed without encountering any very strict construction of the rules of order provided for the government of this body.

In seeking to interpret the terrible conflict through which our country is passing, and to devise, if possible, a just and wise policy for the government in its future action, the mind naturally reverts to the past. There is a sense in which it is well to let by-gones be by-gones, but we can never afford to dispense with the lessons of experience. By an eternal law, as unvarying in politics as in morals, to-day is made the child of yesterday and the parent of to-morrow, the past and the present linked together in the relation of cause and effect, and irrevocably woven into the future. It is true philosophy, therefore, to profit by our mistakes, to the extent of shunning their repetition, while causing the past to reappear where its deeds have been worthy.

The triumph of the Republican Party in 1860 was the triumph. of freedom over slavery. I do not say that all who supported Abraham Lincoln were abolitionists, or even anti-slavery men, or that all who opposed him were the advocates of slavery. This 1 The bill to indemnify the President by suspending the writ of habeas corpus.

would be very far from the exact truth. What I affirm is, that hostility to slavery was the animating sentiment of the men whose deeply-rooted convictions and unquenchable zeal made the formation of the Republican party a necessity, and nerved it with all its real strength; while on the other hand, the espousal of slavery was the grand and darling purpose of those whose shaping hand and inspiring ambition gave life and law to the Democratic organization.

I go further still. The contest of 1860 was not simply at struggle between slavery and freedom, but a struggle of life and death. Slavery, as a system of unskilled labor, demands the right of unrestricted extension over fresh soil, as a condition of its life. This is a law of its nature, attested by the Seminole and Florida wars, the seizure of Texas, the war with Mexico, the repeal of the Missouri Restriction, the raid into Kansas, and by its entire history in this country. Confine it by impassable boundaries, and it will turn upon and devour its own life. Slaveholders understand this perfectly, and I do not marvel that their hostility was not assuaged in the smallest degree by the Republican dogma of non-interference with it in the States. They knew that the exclusion of it from all federal territory would not only put the nation's brand upon it in the States which it scourges, and condemn it as a public enemy, but virtually sentence it to death. They believed, with our Republican fathers, that restriction means destruction. They knew that as the first dose of medicine given to a sick man forms a part of the whole process of cure, so the policy of limitation, as an incipient remedy for our great national malady, would be followed by other measures, moral, economical, and polit ical, which would ultimately but surely expel it from the country. Hence they fought Republicanism with all the zeal and desperation which could be inspired by a great social and moneyed power, threatened with suffocation and death. They were simply obeying the law of self-preservation; and I think it due to frankness to confess that the charge of "abolitionism," which they incessantly hurled at the Republican party, was by no means totally wanting in essential truth. When they were vanquished in the election of Mr. Lincoln, their appeal from the ballot to the bullet was the logical sequence of their insane devotion to slavery, and their conviction that nothing could save it but the ruin of the Republic.

Such was the issue decided by the people in the last Presidential canvass. It was the long-postponed battle between slavery and anti-slavery, fairly encountering each other at the ballot-box. It was a struggle between two intensely hostile ideas, wrestling for

the final mastery of the Republic. Freedom, through the Republican party as its instrument, triumphed over slavery, with both wings of the Democratic party as its servants and tools; for the distinction between Breckinridge Democracy and Douglas Democracy was purely metaphysical, and eluded, entirely, the plain common sense of honest men.

Now, sir, I hold that the people of the United States, who earned and fairly achieved this great victory, had a vested right to its fruits. They had a right to expect that the domination of slavery over the National Government would cease. They had a right to demand that all its departments should be committed to the hands of those who believed in the grand Idea on which the administration ascended to power. And the intervention of the rebellion in no degree whatever released the government from its duty in this respect. The rebellion did not refute, but confirmed, the truth of Republicanism. It was simply a final chapter in the history of the Slave Power, an advanced stage of slaveholding rapacity, naturally born of Democratic misrule; and instead of tempting us to cower before it and surrender our principles, it furnished an overwhelming argument in favor of standing by them to the death.

I do not say that no man who had been identified with the Democratic party should have been appointed to office, but that no man who regarded with indifference the great principle which had triumphed in the canvass; no man, certainly, who was known to be hostile to that principle, should have been allowed to hold any federal office, high or low, civil or military, at home or abroad. This was the duty of the administration, for the simple reason that it could not decline it with fidelity to the people who had installed it in power. The Republican principle was as true after the election as during the canvass; as true in the midst of war as in seasons of peace; and just so far as we have lost sight of this truth, just so far have we strayed from the path of safety. Indeed, instead of putting our principles in abeyance when the storm of war came, we should have clung to them with a redoubled energy and a dedicated zeal. Instead of making terms with our vanquished opponents by conferring upon them office and power, we should have taught them that these were necessarily forfeited in our triumph. And we should have remembered that even our enemies would brand us as hypocrites and cowards, if the administration should be less distinctively Republican in principle and policy than had been the party which created it.

Very nearly allied to the policy of conciliating our opponents

and thus building up their power, was the project of a Union party, encouraged by Republican politicians simultaneously with the beginning of this administration. Such a movement, started soon after a heated political canvass involving the issue of slavery and anti-slavery, was utterly preposterous. The war grew out of the very question which had organized our parties and marshaled them against each other in time of peace; and hence, instead of melting and fusing them into one, their lines of division would be brought out all the more palpably, and their antagonisms all the more intensified. It was incredible that pro-slavery Democracy, after having been so thoroughly drugged and surfeited with the heresies of Southern rebels, should, in the twinkling of an eye, enter into cordial union with the men it had so long traduced. What is now palpable to all men, I thought obvious in the beginning: that a union of Republicans and Democrats, on the single question of putting down the rebellion, ignoring the real issue out of which it sprang, was simply a shallow expedient for dividing the spoils of office, at the cost of a practical surrender of the principles for which Republicans had so zealously contended. I do not say that the disruption of the Democratic party was by any means impossible. There was a vigorous loyal element pervading its rank and file which its unprincipled leadership would have been powerless to control, if Republicans had stood firm. If we had been perfectly true to our own principles, bating no jot of zeal in their maintenance, and frowning upon any movement which sought to soften down or shade off the right-angled character of our anti-slavery policy; if we had bravely accepted the consequences of that policy, branding the rebellion as the child of slavery, and the Democratic party as the great nursing mother that had fed and pampered it into this bloody revolt against the Constitution; if, when the truth of our doctrines and the guilt of our opponents were written down in the fires of civil war, we had called upon all men to join hands with us in saving the country, the Democratic party would have heard its death-knell in the guns of Fort Sumter, and instead of borrowing new life from the cowardice and decline of Republicanism, would have crawled to its guilty and dishonored grave. Only by persistent fidelity to our own principles could we hope either to break down the power of our foes or maintain a real Union movement. This we already had in the Republican party. If there is anywhere a Republican who is not a Union man I would be glad to know where he may be found. This accursed war is upon us to-day because the policy of the government, under the rule of