There is no doubt that all this, while reflecting the good moral feeling of Mr. Blaine, was bad political science and was the very contradictory of sound constitutional law. As has been pointed out several times already, it would have been good constitutional law had the United States Congress simply delayed the admission or readmission {116} of these communities as "States" of the Union until after the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, and any other desirable amendment, should have been framed and adopted. Their admission then would have been into the _same_ Union with all the other States. But to demand of them, as the condition of admission, their acceptance of things not yet in the Constitution of the United States, things not obligatory on the "States" already in the Union, was tantamount to the creation of a new sort of union with another kind of constitution by an Act of Congress. This question had been thoroughly talked out, fought out, and decided in 1820, and for nearly fifty years it had been the settled principle of constitutional law that Congress has no such power. It has been also pointed out that a sound political science of the federal system of government teaches the same principle. [Sidenote: Mr. Stevens's refusal to accept Mr. Blaine's amendment.] [Sidenote: Passage of the bill by the House.] Mr. Stevens acted correctly, from the point of view of political science and constitutional interpretation, when he declined to accept Mr. Blaine's amendment, or to allow a vote to be taken on it, and the House of Representatives also acted correctly from the same point of view when it voted down a proposition from Mr. Blaine to send his amendment along with the bill to the Judiciary Committee of the House with instruction to report it back with the bill. But it is not to be inferred from the debates that either Mr. Stevens or the House was actuated in this course of conduct by the above mentioned considerations. The expansion of the powers of government inevitably consequent upon a long period of war seemed to have made them all very nearly forget that there was anything but government in our political system. The chief thought was that one Congress could not bind another with any such promises as those held {117} out in the Blaine amendment, and that each Congress must at all times be left to its own discretion in the determination of every question. The House passed the bill as it came from the Committee on Reconstruction without change or amendment, and on the 13th of February it appeared in the Senate. [Sidenote: The bill in the Senate.] This more conservative and deliberate body regarded the bill as too radical, and after considerable debate upon a proposed amendment, offered first by Senator Williams of Oregon, and then by Senator Reverdy Johnson, which was in substance the Blaine proposition, laid it aside by general consent and allowed Senator Sherman to offer a substitute for it. [Sidenote: The Sherman substitute.]