In a speech, advocating the passage of the bill, Mr. Eliot presented something of the history of legislation for the freedmen. He said: "On the 3d day of last March the bill establishing a Freedmen's Bureau became a law. It was novel legislation, without precedent in the history of any nation, rendered necessary by the rebellion of eleven slave States and the consequent liberation from slavery of four million persons whose unpaid labor had enriched the lands and impoverished the hearts of their relentless masters. "At an early day, when the fortunes of war had shown alternate triumphs and defeats to loyal arms, and the timid feared and the disloyal hoped, it was my grateful office to introduce the first bill creating a bureau of emancipation. It was during the Thirty-seventh Congress. But, although the select committee to which the bill was referred was induced to agree that it should be reported to the House, it so happened that the distinguished Chairman, Judge White, of Indiana, did not succeed in reporting it for our action. At the beginning of the Thirty-eighth Congress it was again presented, and very soon was reported back to the House under the title of 'A bill to establish a Bureau of Freedmen's Affairs.' It was fully debated and passed by the House. The vote was sixty-nine in favor, and sixty-seven against the bill; but of the sixty-seven who opposed it, fifty-six had been counted against it, because of their political affinities. On the 1st of March, 1864, the bill went to the Senate. It came back to the House on the 30th of June, four days before the adjournment of Congress. To my great regret, the Senate had passed an amendment in the nature of a substitute, attaching this bureau to the Treasury Department; but it was too late to take action upon it then, and the bill was postponed until December. At that time the House non-concurred with the Senate, and a committee of conference was chosen. The managers of the two houses could not agree as to whether the War Department or the Treasury should manage the affairs of the bureau. They therefore agreed upon a bill creating an independent department neither attached to the War nor Treasury, but communicating directly with the President, and resting for its support upon the arm of the War Department. That bill was also passed by the House but was defeated in the Senate. Another Conference Committee was chosen, and that committee, whose chairman in the House was the distinguished gentleman from Ohio, then and now at the head of the Military Committee, agreed upon a bill attaching the bureau to the War Department, and embracing refugees as well as freedmen in its terms. That bill is now the law.