it below
shall present the measure. That miserable political quibbling at Topeka
last winter lost Kansas the place which of right belonged to her--that
of being the first of the loyal States to give her freedmen their
inalienable right to self-protection.

Our hope of salvation from the fatal errors that are now fastening
themselves upon the plan and the policy of reorganization, lies in the
prompt and right action of the coming Congress. The delegates from any
and all of the rebel States, sent up to Washington by "free white loyal
male" suffrages to knock for admission into the Union, must be sent home
with instructions that no member will be admitted to Congress except he
be elected by a majority of all the loyal men of the State, black as
well as white. To the end that Congress may thus reject the amnestied
white suffrage delegates, the people, all over the country, should unite
in one mighty voice and demand that their representatives shall thus
speak and thus vote. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." If we
sleep now, all is lost; for on this one question of the negro hangs the
future of our republic.

Since the firing of the first gun of the rebellion there has been no
hour fraught with so much danger as is the present. To have been
vanquished on the field of battle would have involved much of misery;
but to be foiled now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought
victories, and to re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of negro
disfranchisement, negro serfdom, would be a defeat and disaster, a
cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath to coming generations a
legacy of wars and rumors of wars, equalled only by that which the
Revolutionary fathers entailed upon their descendants by their fatal
compromises with slavery. It would leave the final triumph of the great
principles of republicanism, universal freedom and equality, "taxation
and representation inseparable," the "consent of the governed," to be
worked out and established in each of those old slave States, through a
fearful re-enactment of the early struggles which you of Kansas so well
remember.

If Congress shall admit the rebel representatives on the basis of white
suffrage, those States will have added to their old representation the
other two-fifths of what used to be "all other persons," which will give
them an increase of fourteen votes in the House as a reward for their
four years of fire and sword against the government. With th