was, in a great measure, responsible for the robbery of the Freedmen’s Bank. And this I say more in sorrow than anger. The reader will bear in mind that the acts of Congress, under which the bank’s original charter was granted, prescribed the character of the securities (Government bonds) on which its money could be loaned. The men who had combined to get possession of the bank’s money, on worthless securities, such as Paving Company stock, Seneca Sandstone stock, Morris’ Mining Company stock, stock of the Young Men’s Christian Association, and other stock equally worthless and fraudulent, found this simple and very requisite safeguard a serious impediment to the successful carrying out of their infamous project. They went before a Republican Congress, and with the assurance of experienced cracksmen, asked it to repeal the restrictive clause, and pass an act which made the robbery that followed, possible. And, as the vote will show, a Republican Congress was only too glad to accommodate them. In truth, Congress enacted laws for their benefit, and which virtually placed the funds of the bank at the mercy of the thieves and plunderers, who at once entered its vaults and began the work of emptying them. A Republican Congress placed in the hands of these bad, designing men, the power to make the scrubbers and the washers, the widows and orphans of the poor and the ignorant—even the maimed soldier—unwittingly cash their worthless obligations. Here, and now let me say a few words in DEFENSE OF THE NEGRO. Much has been said and written on the vices, great and small, of the negro. He has been accused of being ignorant, brutish, and vicious, of want of thrift, of having largely developed animal propensities, of a chronic inability to tell the truth, of a disposition to accumulate property not his own, and of a weakness to explore the chicken roosts of his neighbors. In truth he has for more than a century been charged with no end of small vices, and a propensity to do the meanest kind of stealing. Heaven knows he has small vices enough. I admit it and deplore it, as well for its bad effect on society generally, as for the damage it inflicts on his own people. But the thoughtful and candid reader will join me in saying that the negro, in his very worst and most vicious condition to-day, is precisely what slavery made him. Slavery was based on cruelty and tyranny, and was alike destructive—morally, mentally, and commercially—of the best interests of black and white.