le amount is cotton. It will be grown largely at
once. With ten cents a pound export duty it would be furnished cheaper
to foreign markets than they could obtain it from any other part of the
world. The late war has shown that. Two million bales exported, at five
hundred pounds to the bale, would yield $100,000,000. This seems to me
the chief revenue we shall ever derive from the South. Besides, it
would be a protection to that amount to our domestic manufactures.
Other proposed amendments--to make all laws uniform; to prohibit the
assumption of the rebel debt--are of vital importance, and the
only thing that can prevent the combined forces of copperheads and
secessionists from legislating against the interests of the Union
whenever they may obtain an accidental majority.

But this is not all that we ought to do before these inveterate rebels
are invited to participate in our legislation. We have turned, or are
about to turn, loose four million of slaves without a hut to shelter
them, or a cent in their pockets. The infernal laws of slavery have
prevented them from acquiring an education, understanding the commonest
laws of contract, or of managing the ordinary business of life. This
Congress is bound to provide for them until they can take care of
themselves. If we do not furnish them with homesteads, and hedge them
around with protective laws; if we leave them to the legislation of
their late masters, we had better have left them in bondage. Their
condition would be worse than that of our prisoners at Andersonville. If
we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power, we shall deserve
and receive the execration of history and of all future ages.

Two things are of vital importance.

1. So to establish a principle that none of the rebel States shall be
counted in any of the amendments of the Constitution until they are
duly admitted into the family of States by the law-making power of their
conqueror. For more than six months the amendment of the Constitution
abolishing slavery has been ratified by the Legislatures of three
fourths of the States that acted on its passage by Congress, and which
had Legislatures, or which were States capable of acting, or required to
act, on the question.

I take no account of the aggregation of whitewashed rebels, who without
any legal authority have assembled in the capitals of the late rebel
States and simulated legislative bodies. Nor do I regard with any
respect the cunnin