h both are deeply interested
in making harmonious. Each has equal power in settling the terms, and
if left to the laws that regulate capital and labor it is confidently
believed that they will satisfactorily work out the problem. Capital, it
is true, has more intelligence, but labor is never so ignorant as not to
understand its own interests, not to know its own value, and not to see
that capital must pay that value.

This bill frustrates this adjustment. It intervenes between capital and
labor and attempts to settle questions of political economy through the
agency of numerous officials whose interest it will be to foment discord
between the two races, for as the breach widens their employment will
continue, and when it is closed their occupation will terminate.

In all our history, in all our experience as a people living under
Federal and State law, no such system as that contemplated by the
details of this bill has ever before been proposed or adopted. They
establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go
infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for
the white race. In fact, the distinction of race and color is by the
bill made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.
They interfere with the municipal legislation of the States, with the
relations existing exclusively between a State and its citizens, or
between inhabitants of the same State--an absorption and assumption of
power by the General Government which, if acquiesced in, must sap and
destroy our federative system of limited powers and break down the
barriers which preserve the rights of the States. It is another step,
or rather stride, toward centralization and the concentration of all
legislative powers in the National Government. The tendency of the
bill must be to resuscitate the spirit of rebellion and to arrest the
progress of those influences which are more closely drawing around the
States the bonds of union and peace.

My lamented predecessor, in his proclamation of the 1st of January,
1863, ordered and declared that all persons held as slaves within
certain States and parts of States therein designated were and
thenceforward should be free; and further, that the executive government
of the United States, including the military and naval authorities
thereof, would recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.
This guaranty has been rendered especially obligatory and sacred by t