Mr. Stevens opened this debate in the House on the 18th of December (1865). In a powerful speech, he developed anew his doctrine that the territory once covered by the "States," which had seceded from the Union, was nothing now but a conquered district, whose future condition depended upon the will of the conqueror. If "States" should ever be erected there again, it must be accomplished, he contended, by virtue of that provision in the Constitution which declares that "new States may be admitted by Congress into this Union." This theory involved the admission that secession had been temporarily successful. This Mr. Stevens frankly acknowledged. He said: "Unless the law of nations is a dead letter, the late war between the two acknowledged belligerents severed their original contracts, and broke all the ties that bound them together." [Sidenote: Contradiction between Stevens's view and the view of the Administration.] This was the extreme doctrine on the one side. It was in blunt contradiction to the doctrine upon which the Administration was acting, the doctrine that the attempt at secession was entirely abortive, and that the "States" where it was attempted were still in the Union _as "States,"_ and had never been anywhere else or anything else, in fact could not be; that the rebellion was the work of private individuals combined as truly against the real "States" in which it existed as against the {59} United States; and that, therefore, the overthrow of these combinations and the cessation of the military rule of the President must be followed by the resumption on the part of the "States" concerned of all their rights and powers of local self-government and of participation in the United States Government, as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, unimpaired, and without any action whatever on the part of Congress. Mr. Raymond represented this view on the floor of the House of Representatives. He was a Republican of the Seward school, and sympathized entirely with his patron upon this subject. It was a great embarrassment to him that the Democrats immediately gave in their adherence to this view. It helped to prevent him from gaining any following at all for it among the Republicans. But while the Republicans of the House repudiated entirely Mr. Raymond's principles, the great mass of them were not able to accept Mr. Stevens's view of the temporary validity of secession, and the temporary existence of the Southern Confederacy as a foreign power. Their feelings and instincts required a principle of reconstruction which, at the same time that it did not recognize secession as having any validity for the shortest moment, yet regarded the "States" in which it was attempted, as having thereby become something other than "States" of the Union, and as requiring the assent of Congress to the rightful resumption of that status. [Sidenote: Mr. Shellabarger's theory of Reconstruction.]