It is to the eminent credit of the Republican members of Congress that they stood in a crisis of this magnitude true to principle, firm against all the power and all the patronage of the Administration. No unmanly efforts to compromise, no weak shirking from duty, sullied the fame of the great body of senators and representatives. Even the Whig party in 1841, with Mr. Clay for a leader, did not stand so solidly against John Tyler as the Republican party, under the lead of Fessenden and Sumner in the Senate and of Thaddeus Stevens in the House, now stood against the Administration of President Johnson. The Whigs of the country, in the former crisis, lost many of their leading and most brilliant men,--a sufficient number indeed to compass the defeat of Mr. Clay three years later. The loss to the Republican party now was so small as to be unfelt and almost invisible in the political contests into which the party was soon precipitated. The Whigs of 1841 were contending only for systems of finance, and they broke finally with the President because of his veto of a bill establishing a fiscal agency for the use of the Government,--merely a National Bank disguised under another name. The Republicans of 1866 were contending for a vastly greater stake,--for the sacredness of human rights, for the secure foundation of free government. Their constancy was greater than that of the Whigs because the rights of person transcend the rights of property. On the 12th of December Mr. Cowan had submitted a resolution requesting the President to furnish to the Senate information of "the condition of that portion of the United States lately in rebellion; whether the rebellion has been suppressed and the United States again put in possession of the States in which it existed; whether the United-States post-offices are re-established and the revenues collected therefrom; and also, whether the people of those States have re-organized their State governments; and whether they are yielding obedience to the laws and Government of the United States." Mr. Sumner moved an amendment, directing the President to furnish to the Senate at the same time "copies of such reports as he may have received from the officers or agents appointed to visit this portion of the Union, including especially any reports from the Honorable John Covode and Major-General Carl Schurz." The President's message, sent to the Senate a week later, in response to this resolution, was brief, being simply a statement of what had been accomplished by his Reconstruction policy, with an expression of his belief that "sectional animosity is surely and rapidly merging itself into a spirit of nationality; that representation, connected with a properly adjusted system of taxation, will result in a harmonious restoration of the relations of the States to the National Union." He transmitted the report of Mr. Schurz and also invited the attention of the Senate to a report of