Nay, you must not only prove that this is the general character of this population here, but that this condition is so universal and unexceptional that you can not allow them to take this first step in freedom, although it may be hedged about with qualifications and conditions; for which of you who have opposed this measure on the ground of race has proposed to give the benefit of it to such as may be found worthy? Not one of you. And this shows that your objection is founded really on a prejudice, although it assumes the dignity and proportions of an argument. The real question, sir, is, can we afford to be just--nay, if you please, generous--to a race whose shame has been washed out in the consuming fires of war, and which now stands erect and equal before the law with our own? Shall we give hope and encouragement to that race beginning, as it does now for the first time, its career of freedom, by erecting here in the capital of the republic a banner inscribed with the sacred legend of the elder days, 'All men are born free and equal?' or shall we unfurl in its stead that other banner, with a strange device, around which the dissolving remnants of the Democratic party in this hall are called upon to rally, inscribed with no great sentiment of justice or generosity, but bearing upon its folds the miserable appeal of the demagogue, 'This is a white man's Government?' When you inaugurate your newly-discovered political principle, do not forget to invite the colored troops; beat the assembly; call out the remnants of the one hundred and eighty thousand men who marched with steady step through the flames and carnage of war, and many of whom bear upon their bodies the honorable scars received in that unparalleled struggle and in your defense, and as you send your banner down the line, say to them, 'This is the reward of a generous country for the wounds you have received and the sufferings you have endured.' "Shall we follow the great law to which I have referred--the law that liberty is progress--and conform our policy to the spirit of that great law? or shall we, governed by unreasonable and selfish prejudices, initiate a policy which will make this race our hereditary enemy, a mine beneath instead of a buttress to the edifice which you are endeavoring to repair? Sir, I do not hesitate to say that, in my opinion, it were better to follow where conscience and justice point, leaving results to a higher Power, than to shrink from an issue which it is the clear intention of Providence we shall face, or to be driven from our true course by the chimeras which the excited imaginations of political partisans have conjured up, or by the misty ghosts of long-buried errors." Mr. Van Horn, of New York, while willing to accept the bill as originally presented, preferred it as modified by Mr. Hale's amendments. In his speech he charged those who had opposed the bill as laboring in the interest of slavery.