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questions pending between his own and a foreign country, I believed our affairs at the English Court would be conducted by the honorable Senator with ability, courage, and decorum, and that the honor of the country would be safe in his hands.

But, sir, an election took place during the autumn, in the State of Indiana, and the Democratic party succeeded in electing a majority of the Legislature of that State. The Senator at once renounced the mission which he had so recently accepted and assigned as his reason that he would not have his State send a Senator here in his place to represent the political sentiments of the people of Indiana. 

Mr. MORTON. Misrepresent.

Mr. BLAIR. We need not quarrel about that. I shall not use so harsh a term toward him as to say he misrepresents the State of Indiana. He may and doubtless does, believe that he represents the people of the State, but if there was a Senator to be chosen by the Legislature just elected, no one doubts that a Democrat would be chosen; and this fact would furnish the best evidence of the political sentiment of the people.

If the distinguished Senator had gone abroad upon the mission to which he was appointed, he would have learned in the royal court to which he was accredited a greater deference for the popular will he seems to have attained in the party to which he belongs at home. He would have discovered there, in monarchial England, that no minister or public servant can hold office against the popular sentiment; but the Senator holds his place although the people of his state have condemned him in the only form and manner in which public sentiment is ascertained in our country. He openly avows, moreover, that he continues so to hold it to prevent the election of one who more nearly represents the opinions of that body whose duty it is to select a Senator in his place.

The Senator has gone somewhat into the history of the fifteenth amendment, the rightful adoption of which is controverted by his State in the concurrent resolutions passed by the Legislature of Indiana, and which are now under consideration by the Senate. I shall also refer to some historical matters pertaining to that measure. I remember very well that the Congress which proposed that amendment to the States failed to do so until after the presidential election, and that their nominating convention which sat in Chicago held out the promise to the people that no such amendment should be proposed, declaring in emphatic terms that while they claimed the right to regulate the suffrage by Congress in the States lately in revolt, the States that had not been in rebellion should have, and of right ought to have, the power to regulate suffrage for themselves. This was a trick to avoid an issue which would have been fatal to them in the presidential election. But when, after the election, the party to which the Senator belongs had secured another lease of power, they then proposed to the States this amendment, refusing and voting down a proposition made, I think, in both Houses of Congress, certainly in one of the Houses, that the amendment should be submitted to the Legislatures of the States elected after the amendment was submitted by Congress to the States for ratification. This was promptly refused. They did not intend that the people should have anything to do with framing their own organic law. This measure, the Senator declares had become "a political necessity" for his party and could not be trusted to the people. 

What further?  The two Senators who sat here from my own State, neither of whom sit here now, voted for this amendment after the people of Missouri, in the election immediately preceding, had voted down negro suffrage by thirty thousand majority, and the Legislature, elected by that very vote, ratified the amendment, in defiance of this overwhelming expression of public sentiment.

A similar state of facts occurred in Kansas, where, in the election preceding, negro suffrage had been defeated by fifteen thousand majority. In the State of Ohio the majority against negro suffrage was fifty thousand, and yet her Republican Senators and Representatives and her Republican Legislature promptly disregarded the public will by proposing and ratifying this amendment. In the State of Michigan the people refused to give suffrage to the negroes by a majority of thirty-four thousand. Her Senators and Representatives were equally regardless of the wishes of their people and hastened to fasten upon them an organic law for which they had proclaimed their detestation. I could go on and enumerate many more of the northern States in which the people had expressed their equal emphasis and were treated with equal contempt by their Republican Senators and Representatives. Among the number were the States of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey; and, indeed I think that none of the northern States can be excepted, not one.

Mr. HOWARD. If the honorable Senator will allow me a word, I beg to say in reference to the state of Michigan that at the last election held last November the question was taken before the people whether to strike the work "white" out of the constitution of the State, the effect of which would be to make no distinction whatever between white and black in the exercise of the elective franchise, and there was a majority of the voters of the State who ratified that amendment to the constitution of the State.

Mr. BLAIR. That does not touch the question with which I am dealing at all.

Mr. HOWARD. It merely shows what the


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opinion of the majority of the voters of the State to-day is on that particular question.

 Mr. BLAIR. I think it was sufficiently and better shown to the public servants who desired to carry out the will of their constituents by the vote preceding their, action than by the one subsequent to it.

Now, sir, I do not know a single northern State outside of New England in which the people whenever the question has been submitted to them, have not rejected the proposition to allow negro suffrage; and yet these gentlemen hurried the matter through without a constitutional quorum in the State of the Senator from Indiana; and in my State, after the people had condemned it by thirty thousand majority six months previous, the Radical Legislature adopted one half of it on a telegram, not waiting to receive and official and authentic copy, such was their haste to show contempt for the popular will of the State. 

Then the question is raised by the State of Indiana in these resolutions in reference to the ratification of Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia, without the ratification of which States the amendment was not adopted. If adopted at all, we have seen that it was adopted against the remonstrance of all the people of the North, and simply by coercion in the States of the South; and yet that amendment is now to be considered as one of those sacred things upon which no man must lay his hands. Because the perfidious representatives of the people have betrayed their trust and fixed a yoke upon their necks, they are not to wince when they are galled; and if some States, by a fraud obtaining the signatures of the presiding officers if the two Houses, enact into a law that which they had no right to enact, and contrary to the forms ordained in their own constitution, we have no right to examine it, or hold to proper accountability those who have committed the fraud and perverted the forms of law or give effect to their crime.

Sir, if constitutional amendments can be adopted in what way we might well have constitutional amendments here that would create what the gentleman pretends so much to apprehend. If constitutional amendments can be adopted in this mode, against the remonstrance of the entire body of the people of the North, or a vast majority of them, as indicated by the facts to which I have referred, and which are not contradicted in the Senate, and cannot be contradicted, why may we not soon have one declared adopted which provides for a President and Senate for life, and why may not other aristocratic and monarchical institutions be fixed upon us by coercing these carpet-bag States, or in the congressional slang requiring them to adopt another fundamental condition, and by misrepresenting and defying the will of the people in the States of the North? And then we shall be told, in the language of the Senator, that we have no right to say a word; we have no right even to expose the perfidy by which the people have been betrayed; and we shall be denounced as revolutionists if we do.

This is no idle apprehension. Each day ushers in some new and monstrous usurpation of power on the part of the dominant party. One aggression is but the stepping-stone of another. The indignation excited by each successive infringement of the rights of the people is a pretext for still further encroachments. The plea of "political necessity," by which the Senator justifies the adoption of the fifteenth amendment, is always ready, and has become the law of the existence of that party which, having forfeited the confidence of the people, is now compelled to retain power by fraud and force. Hence the bill to employ the Army to enforce the fifteenth amendment, which has grown out of that measure, and the bill now pending in the other House enlarging the powers of the President for the purpose. It is the fungus growth from a rotten system, more poisonous than that which produced it.

 Sir, I had occasion to be very grateful to the Senator from Wisconsin who sits nearest to me [Mr. CARPENTER] for the speech which he made in this Hall the other day, able and learned as it was, vindicating the position which the Democratic party have taken upon this subject. The argument is one which is familiar to us in Missouri. We have there labored under disqualification and disabilities fixed upon us by a constitution of our State by which more than one half the citizens were deprived of the right suffrage and the right to hold office, and even to practice professions by which they earned their bread.

Mr. CARPENTER. Will the Senator allow me to make a suggestion?

Mr. BLAIR. Certainly.

Mr. CARPENTER. I should of course duly appreciate any compliment the Senator from Missouri might pay me at any time and upon any subject; but if I had any choice upon the subject I should very much desire to have him separate it from the matter he is now discussing, and do it at some other time upon some other occasion.

Mr. BLAIR. I shall take great pleasure in doing what the gentleman suggests. I have no disposition to draw him in a way he is disinclined to go, but I thought he walked with a step so firm and manly and with a head so clear the other day upon the question then at issue, and that arguments so irresistibly led to the conclusions which the Democratic party had adopted in reference to test-oaths all over the country, that a Democrat might adopt them. If the Senator does not wish to follow his own logic, or if he thinks his argument does not lead to these conclusions, certainly I do not