“Now, gentlemen, are you sad, are you sorry for these deaths? Are you not glad that Secession is dead? that slavery is dead? that Squatter Sovereignty is dead? that the doctrine of the failure of the war is dead? Then you are glad that you were out-voted in 1860, in 1864, in 1868, and in 1872. If you have tears to shed over these losses, shed them in the graveyard, but not in this House of living men. I know that many a Southern man rejoices that these issues are dead. The gentleman from Mississippi has clothed his joy with eloquence. “Now, gentlemen, if you yourselves are glad that you have suffered defeat during the last sixteen years, will you not be equally glad when you suffer defeat next November? [Laughter.] But pardon that remark; I regret it; I would use no bravado. “Now, gentlemen, come with me for a moment into the camp of the Republican party and review its career. Our central doctrine in 1860 was that slavery should never extend itself over another foot of American soil. Is that doctrine dead? It is folded away like a victorious banner; its truth is alive for evermore on this continent. In 1864 we declared that we would put down the Rebellion and Secession. And that doctrine lives, and will live when the second Centennial has arrived! Freedom, national, universal, and perpetual—our great Constitutional Amendments, are they alive or dead? Alive, thank the God that shields both liberty and Union. And our national credit, saved from the assaults of Pendleton; saved from the assaults of those who struck it later, rising higher and higher at home and abroad; and only now in doubt lest its chief, its only enemy, the Democracy, should triumph in November. “Mr. Chairman, ought the Republican party to surrender its truncheon of command to the Democracy? The gentleman from Mississippi says, if this were England, the ministry would go out in twenty-four hours with such a state of things as we have here. Ah, yes! that is an ordinary case of change of administration. But if this were England, what would she have done at the end of the war? England made one such mistake as the gentleman asks this country to make, when she threw away the achievements of the grandest man that ever trod her highway of power. Oliver Cromwell had overturned the throne of despotic power, and had lifted his country to a place of masterful greatness among the nations of the earth; and when, after his death, his great scepter was transferred to a weak though not unlineal hand, his country, in a moment of reactionary blindness, brought back the Stuarts. England did not recover from that folly until, in 1689, the Prince of Orange drove from her island the last of that weak and wicked line. Did she afterward repeat the blunder?