For the protection of the national freedman a Constitutional Amendment is presented for ratification, placing his right to vote under the perpetual safeguard of the nation; but I am obliged to remind you that this Amendment has not yet obtained the requisite number of States, nor can I say surely when it will. The Democratic Party is arrayed against it, and the Rebel interest unites with the Democracy. Naturally they go together. They are old cronies. Here let me say frankly that I have never ceased to regret,--I do now most profoundly regret,--that Congress, in its plenary powers under the Constitution, especially in its great unquestionable power to guaranty a republican government in the States, did not summarily settle this whole question, so that it should no longer disturb the country. It was for Congress to fix the definition of a republican government; nor need it go further than our own Declaration of Independence, where is a definition from which there is no appeal. There it is, as it came from our fathers, in lofty, self-evident truth; and Congress should have applied it. Or it might have gone to the speech of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, where again is the same great definition. There was also a decisive precedent. As Congress made a Civil Rights Law, so should it have made a Political Rights Law. In each case the power is identical. If it can be done in the one, it can be done in the other. To my mind nothing is clearer. Thus far Congress has thought otherwise. There remains, then, the slow process of Constitutional Amendment, to which the country must be rallied. * * * * *