It fell to Senator Kern to open the debate on the reports of the committee and to review the evidence upon which the minority had reached its conviction of the guilt of the accused senator. It was not an easy task to adequately, concisely, survey the field that had been covered by hearings covering more than a hundred days, requiring 8,588 printed pages, and including the testimony of 180 witnesses. Kern’s training and skill as a lawyer made it possible for him to quickly brush aside the non-essentials, but it was necessary for him to go over the greater part of the record for the proper verification and marshaling of his facts. He spent many days carefully going through the voluminous testimony jotting down his notes on scrap paper, and the greater part of the week preceding the delivery of his speech found him at his room at Congress Hall engaged in the writing of his speech--for the major part of it was reduced to writing and read in the senate. The speech was delivered in four parts on four separate days, and when he began the delivery of the first part nothing of that which had been prepared was to be delivered in the second part. In fact each day he spoke found him working upon his speech up to the moment he was summoned to the senate, and he found time for the typewriting of practically none of it. The Press Gallery was clamoring for advance copy, but not a line was furnished any paper in advance of its delivery, and the Chicago papers which published it in full were forced to make special arrangements with the official reporter of the senate. He was physically almost exhausted when he began and almost ill before he concluded. That it was a powerful, unanswerable, logical and eloquent arraignment of the accused senator was the consensus of opinion among the lawyers of the senate, and while other senators spoke with comparative brevity in favor of the minority report, the ground had been so exhaustively and conclusively covered by Kern that these confined themselves to one or two features of the case. He did not spare in his sarcasms the untenable positions of the majority members of the committee. He took the position that members of the legislature had been bribed; showed from the evidence that there was no escape from that position; traced the relationship between those members and Lee O’Neil Browne, the Lorimer leader, and between Browne and the senator and then invited the senate to accept the reasoning of the majority report if it could. The plea of res adjudicata, upon which the friends of Lorimer made their final stand, and which was suggested by the Lorimer attorney in the last hours of the hearings, appealed to Kern as a brazen daylight attempt to thwart the ends of justice. Beginning on June 4 he closed after an exhaustive analysis of the evidence on June 8th with an eloquent denunciation of the bi-partisan system of which Lorimer was a member, a beneficiary, and was to become a victim.