may reach the highest
honors with the House can confer.

If, ambitious of a career, Mr. Raymond had been elected to Congress
when he was chosen to the New-York Legislature at twenty-nine years of
age, or five years later when he was made Lieutenant-governor of his
State, he might have attained a great parliamentary fame. It has long
been a tradition of the House that no man becomes its leader who does
not enter it before he is forty. Like most sweeping affirmations this
has its exceptions, but the list of young men who have been advanced
to prominent positions in the body is so large that it may well be
assumed as the rule of promotion. Mr. Raymond was nearly forty-six
when he made his first speech in the House. While he still exhibited
the intellectual acuteness and alertness which had always been his
characteristics, there was apparent in his face the mental weariness
which had come from the prolonged and exacting labor of his profession.
His parliamentary failure was a keen disappointment to him, and was not
improbably one among many causes which cut short a brilliant and useful
life. He died in 1869, in the forty-ninth year of his age.

This first debate on reconstruction developed the fact that the
Democrats in Congress would endeavor to regain the ground they had lost
by their hostility to Mr. Lincoln's Administration during the war. The
extreme members of that party, while the war was flagrant, adhered to
many dogmas which were considered unpatriotic and in none more so than
the declaration that even in the case of secession "there is no power
in the Constitution to coerce a State." They now united in the
declaration, as embodied in the resolution of Mr. Voorhees, that "no
State or number of States confederated together can in any manner
sunder their connection with the Federal Union." This was intended as
a direct and defiant answer to the heretical creed of Mr. Stevens, that
the States by their attempted secession were really no longer members
of the Union and could not become so until regularly re-admitted by
Congress. By antagonizing this declaration the Democrats strove to
convince the country that it was the accepted doctrine of their
political opponents, and that they were themselves the true and tried
friends of the Union.

The great majority of the Republican leaders, however, did not at all
agree with the theory of Mr. Stevens and the mass of the party were
steadily against him. The one si