MR. PRESIDENT,--I would not fail in any courtesy to any Senator, especially in any courtesy to the Senator from Vermont, for whom I have all kindness and honor, but I think Senators will agree that nothing passed yesterday between us by which I am in any way constrained, so that I may not ask the Senate to proceed at once with this bill. If I could see the question as my friend from Connecticut sees it, he may be assured that I should not press the bill. I do not see it so; but I do see that this bill is now on our table numbered _One_: it is the first bill of the Calendar. I see also that at this time the Senate has no business before it; and should I not fail in duty, if I did not ask the Senate to proceed during this unoccupied time with a bill which I regard as so important, and which is actually the first in order, being foremost among all bills? But my friend from Connecticut reminds me of a recent decision of the Supreme Court. For that Court I have great respect. Personal and professional familiarity with the Court, and study of its judgments running now for much more than a generation, incline me always to deference when its decisions are mentioned; but if I understood my friend, he relies upon a newspaper report. Sir, I have read the judgment of that Court, communicated to me by one of its members in an official copy; and I have no hesitation in saying that the Senator is entirely mistaken, if he supposes that by a hair’s breadth it interferes with the constitutionality of the bill which I now move. Sir, there is no such lion in our path. It exists only in the imagination of my friend,--or in the desire, which he has so often manifested, to interfere with the adoption of this measure. But the Senator is mistaken if he supposes that I charge upon him any indifference to Human Rights. Never, in any debate, has any word fallen from me which that Senator can so misinterpret. I know too well his heart, his excellent and abounding nature, his New-England home, to attribute to him any such indifference. But I do know full well, for the Senator has often declared it, that he acts under interpretations of the Constitution which it seems to me belong to the period anterior to the war rather than since the war. It seems to me--I may be mistaken, but I cannot help saying it--that the Senator has not yet recognized that greatest of all victories by which a new interpretation is fixed upon the National Constitution, so that hereafter all its sentences, all its phrases, all its words, shall be interpreted broadly and emphatically for Human Rights. How often have I been obliged to say this! But the Senator forgets that victory. There is his error. Most sincerely, most ardently, do I trust that the Senate will never forget it; I hope we shall duly act upon it, and celebrate it in our acts.