"Mr. Speaker, it seems to me ridiculously inconsistent for gentlemen upon this floor to prate so much about a republican form of government, and rise here and offer resolution after resolution about the Monroe doctrine and the downtrodden Mexicans, while they force upon the people of this District a government not of their own choice, because the voter in a popular government is a governor himself. But, sir, this is only part of a grand plan. Gentlemen who dare not go before their white constituents and urge that a negro shall have a vote in their own States, come here and undertake to thrust negro suffrage upon the people here. Gentlemen whose States have repudiated the idea of giving the elective franchise to negroes, come here and are willing to give the suffrage to negroes here, as if they intended to make this little District of Columbia a sort of negro Eden; as if they intended to say to the negroes of Virginia and Maryland and Delaware, 'You have no right to vote in these States, but if you will go to Washington you can vote there.' I imagine I can see them swarming up from different sections of the country to this city and inquiring where the polls are. Agents, men and women, such as there are at work in this city, will no doubt be at work in these States, telling them to pack their knapsacks and march to Washington, for on such a day there is to be an election, and there they will have the glorious privilege of the white man. Sir, all this doctrine is destructive of the American system of government, which recognizes the right of no man to participate in it unless he is a citizen, which secures to the citizen his voice in the control and management of the Government, and prevents those not citizens from standing in the way of the exercise of his just rights. "This Government does not belong to any race so that it can be divested or disposed of. The present age have no right to terminate it. It is ours to enjoy and administer, and to transmit to posterity unimpaired as we received it from the fathers." Mr. Boutwell, of Massachusetts, then addressed the House: "When we emancipated the black people, we not only relieved ourselves from the institution of slavery, we not only conferred upon them freedom, but we did more, we recognized their manhood, which, by the old Constitution and the general policy and usage of the country, had been, from the organization of the Government until the Emancipation Proclamation, denied to all of the enslaved colored people. As a consequence of the recognition of their manhood, certain results follow in accordance with the principles of this Government, and they who believe in this Government are, by necessity, forced to accept those results as a consequence of the policy of emancipation which they have inaugurated and for which they are responsible.