Mr. Wilson replied: "The Senator who has just addressed us questions the testimony adduced here by my colleague yesterday. He might as well question the massacre at Fort Pillow, and the cruelties perpetrated at Andersonville, where eighty-three per cent, of the men who entered the hospitals died--Andersonville, where more American soldiers lie buried than fell throughout the Mexican war; where more American soldiers lie buried than were killed in battle of British soldiers in Wellington's four great battles in Spain, and at Waterloo, Alma, Inkermann, and Sebastopol. The Senator might as well question the atrocities of sacked Lawrence and other atrocities committed during the war. If he will go into the Freedman's Bureau, and examine and study the official records of officers who, for five or six months, have taken testimony and have large volumes of sworn facts; if he will go into the office of General Holt, and read the reports there, his heart and soul will be made sick at the wrongs man does to his fellow-man." The Senator, in the course of his remarks, took occasion to express his opinion of "conservatism:" "Progress is to be made only by fidelity to the great cause by which we have stood during the past four years of bloody war. For twenty-five years we had a conflict of ideas, of words, of thoughts--words and thoughts stronger than cannon-balls. We have had four years of bloody conflict. Slavery, every thing that belongs or pertains to it, lies prostrate before us to-day, and the foot of a regenerated nation is upon it. There let it lie forever. I hope no words or thoughts of a reactionary character are to be uttered in either house of Congress. I hope nothing is to be uttered here in the name of 'conservatism,' the worst word in the English language. If there is a word in the English language that means treachery, servility, and cowardice, it is that word 'conservative.' It ought never hereafter to be on the lips of an American statesman. For twenty years it has stood in America the synonym of meanness and baseness. I have studied somewhat carefully the political history of the country during the last fifteen or twenty years, and I have always noticed that when I heard a man prate about being a conservative and about conservatism, he was about to do some mean thing. [Laughter.] I never knew it to fail; in fact, it is about the first word a man utters when he begins to retreat."