Washburne, he said: "It became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery.

As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not, therefore, be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.

The ability and the disposition of the country were made so conspicuous that all honest doubts were removed, and the repudiators were shamed into silence.

The redemption of the debt by the purchase of bonds in the open market strengthened the public credit, and laid a foundation for the resumption of specie payments.

The war had not been prosecuted successfully, the expenses were enormous, taxes were heavy, multitudes of families were in grief, and the prospects of peace through victory were very dim.

We are at the end of the insane revel of partisan license, which, for thirty years, has, in the United States, worn the mask of government.

We are about to close the masquerade by the dance of death.

The nations of the world look anxiously to see if the people, ere they tread that measure, will come to themselves.

Yet in the early youth of our national life we are already exhausted by premature excesses.

The corruption of our political maxims has relaxed the tone of public morals and degraded the public authorities from terror to the accomplices of evil-doers.

The Government under their disastrous influence has gradually ceased to fertilize the fields of domestic and useful legislation, and pours itself, like an impetuous torrent, along the barren ravine of party and sectional strife.

It is to this fearful demoralization of the Government and the people that we must ascribe the disastrous defections which now perplex us with the fear of change in all that constituted our greatness.

In the struggle for party power, the two great regions of the country have been brought face to face upon the most dangerous of all subjects of agitation.

The authority of the Government was relaxed just when its power was about to be assailed; and the people, emancipated from every control and their passions inflamed by the fierce struggle for the Presidency, were the easy prey of…

Instances there have been of success, but I have never known a case where a public man has not suffered in reputation by the knowledge that he had accumulated a fortune while he was engaged in the public service.

He did not believe in secession, as a wise and proper policy, but he did believe in the right of a State to consult itself as to its continuance in the Union.

In his political action he seemed more anxious to annoy his opponents than to extinguish them.

Those who acquire and retain power are the earnest and persistent men.

He was an anti-slavery man, a friend to temperance and an earnest supporter of the public school system, and he would not have hesitated to promote those objects by arrangements with friends or enemies.

First and last many a new member was extinguished by his sarcastic thrusts.

In public all these weapons were poisoned, but in private he was usually genial.

The temptation to give the benefit of the increase to the members of the then existing House was too strong for their judgment and virtue.

Outside of the criminal classes there has but seldom been a more melancholy exhibition of the weakness of human nature.

The members seemed not to realize that the wrong was in the votes for which those members were alone responsible who had sustained the bill, and that the acceptance of the salary which the law allowed was not only a right but a duty.

My active radicalism had alienated the conservative Republicans.