With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. HENRY WINTER DAVIS, OF MARYLAND. (BORN 1817, DIED 1865.) ON RECONSTRUCTION; THE FIRST REPUBLICAN THEORY; HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, MARCH 22, 1864. MR. SPEAKER: The bill which I am directed by the committee on the rebellious States to report is one which provides for the restoration of civil government in States whose governments have been overthrown. It prescribes such conditions as will secure not only civil government to the people of the rebellious States, but will also secure to the people of the United States permanent peace after the suppression of the rebellion. The bill challenges the support of all who consider slavery the cause of the rebellion, and that in it the embers of rebellion will always smoulder; of those who think that freedom and permanent peace are inseparable, and who are determined, so far as their constitutional authority will allow them, to secure these fruits by adequate legislation. * * * It is entitled to the support of all gentlemen upon this side of the House, whatever their views may be of the nature of the rebellion, and the relation in which it has placed the people and States in rebellion toward the United States; not less of those who think that the rebellion has placed the citizens of the rebel States beyond the protection of the Constitution, and that Congress, therefore, has supreme power over them as conquered enemies, than of that other class who think that they have not ceased to be citizens and States of the United States, though incapable of exercising political privileges under the Constitution, but that Congress is charged with a high political power by the Constitution to guarantee republican governments in the States, and that this is the proper time and the proper mode of exercising it. It is also entitled to the favorable consideration of gentlemen upon the other side of the House who honestly and deliberately express their judgment that slavery is dead. To them it puts the question whether it is not advisable to bury it out of sight, that its ghost may no longer stalk abroad to frighten us from our propriety. * * *