“As a faithful friend and supporter of your administration, I most respectfully petition you to suspend for the present your policy towards the Rebel States. I should not present this prayer, if I were not painfully convinced that thus far it has failed to obtain any reasonable guaranties for that security in the future which is essential to peace and reconciliation. To my mind, it abandons the freedmen to the control of their ancient masters, and leaves the national debt exposed to repudiation by returning Rebels. The Declaration of Independence asserts the equality of all men, and that rightful government can be founded only on the consent of the governed. I see small chance of peace, unless these great principles are practically established. Without this the house will continue divided against itself. “CHARLES SUMNER, “_Senator of the United States_.”[258] Not content with these efforts, in an article more literary than political in its character, which found a place in the “Atlantic Monthly” for December, 1865, entitled, “Clemency and Common Sense: a Curiosity of Literature, with a Moral,” I again returned to this same question. I will quote only a brief passage. “Again, we are told gravely that the national power which decreed Emancipation cannot maintain it by assuring universal enfranchisement, because an imperial government must be discountenanced,--as if the whole suggestion of ‘Imperialism’ or ‘Centralism’ were not out of place, until the national security is established, and our debts, whether to the national freedman or the national creditor, are placed where they cannot be repudiated. A phantom is created, and, to avoid this phantom, we drive towards concession and compromise, as from Charybdis to Scylla.”[259] The session of Congress opened December 4, 1865, and you will find that on the first day I introduced two distinct measures of Reconstruction, with Equality before the Law as their corner-stone. The first was a bill in the following terms:-- “A Bill in part execution of the guaranty of a republican form of government in the Constitution of the United States. “Whereas it is declared in the Constitution that the United States shall guaranty to every State in this Union a republican form of government; and whereas certain States have allowed their governments to be subverted by rebellion, so that the duty is now cast upon Congress of executing this guaranty: Now, therefore,