This course on the part of the Southern States was simply a declaration of defiance to Congress. It was as if they had said in so many words: "We are entitled to representation in Congress, and we propose to resume it on our own terms; and therefore we reject your conditions with scorn. We will not consent to your Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. We will not consent that the freedom of the negro shall be made secure by endowing him with citizenship. We demand that without giving negroes the right to vote, they shall yet be counted in the basis of representation, thus increasing our political power when we re-enter Congress beyond that which we enjoyed before we rebelled, and beyond that which white men in the North shall ever enjoy. We decline to give any guarantee for the validity of the public debt. We decline to guarantee the sacredness of pensions to soldiers disabled in the War for the Union. We decline to pledge ourselves that the debts incurred in aid of the Rebellion shall not in the future be paid by our States. We decline, in brief, to assent to any of the conditions or provisions of the proposed amendment to the Constitution, and we deny your right to amend it without our consent." The madness of this course on the part of the Southern leaders was scarcely less than the madness of original secession; and it is difficult, in deliberately weighing all the pertinent incidents and circumstances, to discover any motive which could, even to their own distorted view, justify the position they had so rashly taken. Strong as the Republican party had shown itself in the elections, it grew still stronger in all the free States, as each of the Confederate States proclaimed its refusal to accept the Fourteenth Amendment as the basis of their return to representation. The response throughout the North, in the mouths of the loyal people, was in effect: "If these rebel States are not willing now to resume representation on the terms offered, let them stay out until their anger ceases and their reason returns. If they are not willing to concede the guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment, and to give that pledge to the country of their future loyalty and their common sense of justice, they shall find that we can be as resolute as they, and we shall insist on the right as stubbornly as they persist in the wrong." These were not merely the declamations of statesmen, or of the press, or of the popular speakers of the Republican party. They came spontaneously, as if by inspiration, from the mass of the people, and were based on that instinctive sense of justice which the multitude rarely fails to exhibit.