or six months, have taken testimony
and have large volumes of sworn facts; if he will go into the office
of General Holt, and read the reports there, his heart and soul will
be made sick at the wrongs man does to his fellow-man."

The Senator, in the course of his remarks, took occasion to express
his opinion of "conservatism:" "Progress is to be made only by
fidelity to the great cause by which we have stood during the past
four years of bloody war. For twenty-five years we had a conflict of
ideas, of words, of thoughts--words and thoughts stronger than
cannon-balls. We have had four years of bloody conflict. Slavery,
every thing that belongs or pertains to it, lies prostrate before us
to-day, and the foot of a regenerated nation is upon it. There let it
lie forever. I hope no words or thoughts of a reactionary character
are to be uttered in either house of Congress. I hope nothing is to be
uttered here in the name of 'conservatism,' the worst word in the
English language. If there is a word in the English language that
means treachery, servility, and cowardice, it is that word
'conservative.' It ought never hereafter to be on the lips of an
American statesman. For twenty years it has stood in America the
synonym of meanness and baseness. I have studied somewhat carefully
the political history of the country during the last fifteen or twenty
years, and I have always noticed that when I heard a man prate about
being a conservative and about conservatism, he was about to do some
mean thing. [Laughter.] I never knew it to fail; in fact, it is about
the first word a man utters when he begins to retreat."

Mr. Wilson declared his motives in proposing this bill, and yet
cheerfully acquiesced in its probable fate: "Having read hundreds of
pages of records and of testimony, enough to make the heart and soul
sick, I proposed this bill as a measure of humanity. I desired, before
we entered on the great questions of public policy, that we should
pass a simple bill annulling these cruel laws; that we should do it
early, and then proceed calmly with our legislation. That was my
motive for bringing this bill into the Senate so early in the session.
Many of the difficulties occurring in the rebel States, between white
men and black men, between the old masters and the freedmen, grow out
of these laws. They are executed in various parts of the States; the
military arrest their execution frequently, and the agents of the
Freedmen's