“Suppose the policy of the gentleman were adopted to-day. Let the order go forth; sound the ‘recall’ on your bugles, and let it ring from Texas to the far Atlantic, and tell the armies to come back. Call the victorious legions back over the battle-field of blood forever now disgraced. Call them back over the territory which they have conquered. Call them back, and let the minions of secession chase them with derision and jeers as they come. And then tell them that the man across the aisle, from the free State of Ohio, gave birth to the monstrous proposition. “Mr. Chairman, if such a word should be sent forth through the armies of the Union, the wave of terrible vengeance that would sweep back over this land could never find a parallel in the records of history. Almost in the moment of final victory, the ‘recall’ is sounded by a craven people not desiring freedom. We ought, every man, to be made a slave should we sanction such a sentiment. “The gentleman has told us there is no such thing as coercion justifiable under the Constitution. I ask him for one moment to reflect, that no statute ever was enforced without coercion. It is the basis of every law in the universe,—God’s law as well as man’s. A law is no law without coercion behind it. When a man has murdered his brother, coercion takes the murderer, tries him, and hangs him. When you levy your taxes, coercion secures their collection; it follows the shadow of the thief and brings him to justice; it accompanies your diplomacy to foreign courts, and backs a declaration of the nation’s right by a pledge of the nation’s power. Again, he tells us that oaths taken under the amnesty proclamation are good for nothing. The oath of Galileo was not binding upon him. I am reminded of another oath that was taken; but perhaps it was an oath on the lips alone to which the heart made no response. “I remember to have stood in a line of nineteen men on that carpet yonder on the first day of the session, and I remember that another oath was passed round and each member signed it as provided by law, utterly repudiating the rebellion and its pretenses. Does that gentleman not blush to speak of Galileo’s oath? Was not his own its counterpart? “He says that the Union can never be restored because of the terrible hatred engendered by the war. To prove it, he quotes what some Southern man said a few years ago, that he knew no hatred between people in the world like that between the North and the South. And yet that North and South have been one nation for eighty-eight years!