"I suppose it is a foregone conclusion that this measure, as one of a series of measures, is to be passed through this Congress regardless of all consequences. But the day that the President of the United States places his approval and signature to that Freedmen's Bureau Bill, and to this bill, he will have signed two acts more dangerous to the liberty of his countrymen, more disastrous to the citizens of this country, than all the acts which have been passed from the foundation of the Government to the present hour; and if we on this side of the chamber manifest anxiety and interest in reference to these bills, and the questions involved in them, it is because, having known this population all our lives, knowing them in one hour of our infancy better than you gentlemen have known them all your lives, we feel compelled, by a sense of duty, earnestly and importunately, it may be, to appeal to the judgment of the American Senate, and to reach, if possible, the judgment of the great mass of the American people, and invoke their attention to the awful consequences involved in measures of this character. Sir, stop, stop! the mangled, bleeding body of the Constitution of your country lies in your path; you are treading upon its bleeding body when you pass these laws." After having argued at considerable length that this bill would be a most unconstitutional interference on the part of the Federal Government with "the powers of the States under the Federal Constitution," the Senator from Delaware thus concluded: "Sir, from early boyhood I was taught to love and revere the Federal Union and those who made it. In early childhood I read the words of the Father of his country, in which he exhorted the people to cling to the union of these States as the palladium of liberty, and my young heart bounded with joy in reading the burning words of lofty patriotism. I was taught in infancy to admire, as far as the infant mind could admire, our free system of government, Federal and State; and I heard the old men say that the wit of man never devised a better or more lovely system of government. When I arrived at that age when I could study and reflect for myself, the teachings of childhood were approved by the judgment of the man.