stion for the
improvement of the primary principles or general structure of our
Government, and I would heal its wounds so carefully that it should
descend to posterity unstained and unmarred as it came, under the
guidance of Providence, from the hands of those who fashioned it.

[Illustration: Hon. William D. Kelley, representative from
Pennsylvania.]

"For whom do we ask this legislation? In 1860, according to the
census, there were fourteen thousand three hundred and sixteen colored
people in this District, and we ask this legislation for the male
adults of that number. Are they in rags and filth and degradation? The
tax-books of the District will tell you that they pay taxes on
$1,250,000 worth of real estate, held within the limits of this
District. On one block, on which they pay taxes on fifty odd thousand
dollars, there are but two colored freeholders who have not bought
themselves out of slavery. One of them has bought as many as eight
persons beside himself--a wife and seven children. Coming to freedom
in manhood, mortgaged for a thousand or fifteen hundred dollars as his
own price, he has earned and carried to the Southern robber thousands
of dollars, the price extorted for his wife and children, and is now a
freeholder in this District. They have twenty-one churches, which they
own, and which they maintain at an annual cost of over twenty thousand
dollars. Their communing members number over forty-three hundred. In
their twenty-two Sunday-schools they gather on each Sabbath over three
thousand American children of African descent. They maintain, sir, to
the infamous disgrace of the American Congress and people,
thirty-three day schools, eight of which are maintained exclusively by
contributions from colored citizens of the District; the remainder by
their contributions, eked out by contributions from the generous
people of the North; and every dollar of their million and a quarter
dollars of real estate and personal property is taxed for schools to
educate the children of the white people of the District, the fathers
of many of those children having been absent during the war fighting
for the Confederacy and against our constitutional flag. Who shall
reproach them with being poor and ignorant while Congress, which has
exclusive jurisdiction over the District, has, till last year, robbed
them day by day, and barred the door of the public school against
them? Such reproach does not lie in the white man's mou