On the evening of the 22d of February, three days after his successful veto, the President made a most important speech from the steps of the White House to a large popular meeting assembled to congratulate him upon his victory. He was betrayed by his elation and warmth into an abusive denunciation of his enemies, once, and only a few months before, his best friends. He went so far as to declare that Stevens and Sumner and Phillips and others like them were, in his opinion, laboring as assiduously to destroy the fundamental principles of the government as were the leaders of the rebellion. After such an open challenge, the contest was nearly unavoidable. It was not avoided, whatever might have been the possibilities of re-establishing harmony. And it cannot be denied that, from this moment, personal rancor against the President filled the heart of Stevens, at least, if not of the others. The President's utterances were, indeed, highly exasperating, and it would have required a very large measure of public virtue to have ignored them. {68} [Sidenote: The Civil Rights Bill.] As a part of the same plan for securing the civil rights of the freedmen against the hostile legislation of the President's reconstructed "States," the Judiciary Committee of the Senate reported a Civil Rights bill to the Senate one day before it reported the Freedmen's Bureau bill, that is, on the 11th of January. The right of way, so to speak, was, however, given to the latter bill, and Congress was nearly two months longer in perfecting the former than the latter. This Civil Rights bill certainly avoided many of the most serious objections which could be truthfully made against the Freedmen's Bureau bill. It was not a war measure in a time of peace. It did not provide a privileged jurisdiction for any class, and it did not create an army of new officials to drain the Treasury and increase the patronage of the President.