* * * * * Indulge me still further while for a moment I allude to myself. The Republican State Convention has by formal resolution presented me for reëlection to the Senate, so that this question enters into the larger canvass. Meeting my fellow-citizens now, it would not be out of order, I believe, nor should I depart from any of the proprieties of my position, if I proceeded to give you an account of my stewardship during the term of service about to expire. But when I consider that this extends over six busy years, beginning while the Rebellion still raged and continuing through all the anxious period of Reconstruction,--that it embraces nothing less than the Abolition of Slavery, and all the steps by which this transcendent measure was promoted and consummated, also the various efforts for the establishment of Equal Rights, especially in the court-room and at the ballot-box, thus helping the fulfilment of the promises originally made in the Declaration of Independence,--that it embraces, besides, all the infinite questions of taxation, finance, railroads, business and foreign relations, including many important treaties, among which was that for the acquisition of the Russian possessions in North America,--and considering, further, how these transactions belong to the history of our country, where they are already read, I content myself with remarking that in all of them I have borne a part, I trust not unworthy of the honored Commonwealth whose representative I am; and here I invite your scrutiny and candid judgment. Possibly some of the frequent criticism to which I have been exposed is already dulled by time or answered by events. A venerable statesman, eminent in the profession, once rebuked me for the term _Equality before the Law_, which I had taken from the French, as expressing more precisely than the Declaration of Independence that equality in rights which is all that constitutions or laws can secure. My learned critic had never met this term in the Common Law, or in the English language, and therefore he did not like the innovation. In the same spirit other efforts have been encountered, often with virulence, especially those two fundamentals of Reconstruction,--first, the power of Congress over the Rebel States, whether as territories, or provinces, or as States having no republican government, or, according to the language of President Lincoln, “out of their proper practical relation with the Union,”[265] and, secondly, the necessity of lifting the freedman into Equal Rights, civil and political, so as to make him a part of the body politic. Who can forget the clamor at these two propositions? All this has happily ceased, except as an echo from Rebels and their allies, whose leading part is a protest against the power of Congress and the equal rights of the freedman. * * * * *