"Sir, as I have already remarked, we have passed through a fiery ordeal. There are but few homes within our land that are not made desolate by the loss of a son or a father. The widow and the orphan meet us wherever we turn. The maimed and crippled soldiers of the republic are every-where seen. Many fair fields have become cemeteries, where molder the remains of the noble men who have laid down their lives in defense of our Government. We thought that we had attained the crisis of our troubles during the progress of the war. But it has been said that the ground-swell of the ocean after the storm is often more dangerous to the mariner than the tempest itself; and I am inclined to think that this is true in reference to the present posture of our national affairs. The storm has apparently subsided; but, sir, if we fail to do our duty now as a nation--and that duty is so simple that a child can understand it; no elaborate argument need enforce it, as no sophistry can conceal it; it is simply to give to one man the same rights that we give to another--if we fail now in this our plain duty as a nation, then the ship of state is in more peril from this ground-swell on which we are riding than it was during the fierce tempest of war. I trust that this Congress will have the firmness and wisdom to guide the old ship safely into the haven of peace and security. This we can do by fixing our eyes upon the guiding star of our fathers--the equal rights of all men." The discussion was resumed on the following day, January 12, by Mr. Davis, of New York: "Republican government can never rest safely, it can never rest peacefully, upon any foundation save that of the intelligence and virtue of its subjects. No government, republican in form, was ever prosperous where its people were ignorant and debased. And in this Government, where our fathers paid so much attention to intelligence, to the cultivation of virtue, and to all considerations which should surround and guard the foundations of the republic, I am sure that we would do dishonor to their memory by conferring the franchise upon men unfitted to receive it and unworthy to exercise it. "I am perfectly aware that in many States we have given the elective franchise to the white man who is debased and ignorant. I regret it, because I think that intelligence ought always, either as to the black or the white man, to be made a test of suffrage. And I glory in the principles that have been established by Massachusetts, which prescribes, not that a man should have money in his purse, but that he should have in his head a cultivated brain, the ability to read the Constitution of his country, and intelligence to understand his rights as a citizen.