rt of the offer. That does not
lie in the mouth of any one to say, who excluded the evidence, or
justified its exclusion. The characters of the counsel who made the
offer, and of the commissioner who moved its acceptance, are a guarantee
not only of their good faith, but of a reason for their belief. No man
has any right to deny that the proof offered would have been made good,
who refused the opportunity. They who closed their ears should in
decency keep their mouths shut. But it was not the counsel and the
commissioner alone who believed that the proof offered would be made
good. Every one who witnessed the examinations in Washington, every one
who read the testimony taken by the Congressional Committees in
Louisiana, must have been satisfied that the conduct of the Returning
Board was throughout unlawful, wicked, and shocking, to the last degree.

The title of the acting President, however valid in law, if valid at
all, is tainted with fraud in fact. There was fraud in certifying that
Brewster had received a majority of the votes of Louisiana, and fraud in
attempting to evade that part of the Constitution which pronounced his
disqualification. When the Electoral Commission advised Congress, and
Congress accepted, by not rejecting, the advice, that fraud could not be
proved, that advice being but the equivalent of saying that fraud was of
no consequence; when it advised that the incompetency of the Returning
Board, for want of jurisdiction, could not be proved, such proof being
but the equivalent of proof that the pretended board was not a board at
all; when it advised that the forgery, by direction of the board, of the
statements and affidavits on which it pretended to act as true could not
be proved, that proof being but the equivalent of proof that the
pretended statements and affidavits were not statements and affidavits
at all; when it advised that the barrier raised by the Constitution
against the appointment of a Federal officer to choose a Federal
President, was not a barrier at all--the moral sense of the whole
American people was shocked. No form of words can cover up the
falsehood; no sophistry can hide it; no lapse of time wash it out. It
will follow its contrivers wherever they go, confront them whenever they
turn, and as often as one of them asks the suffrages of his countrymen,
he may expect to hear them reply, "Why do you reason with us, why seek
to persuade us into giving you our votes, you that have t