The Free Silver Republicans, therefore, were not inclined to support a measure that was particularly offensive to their friends and allies on the silver question.

After a careful canvass of the Senate it was developed that the Republican leaders could not safely count on the support of any one of the Free Silver Republicans in their efforts to pass the bill, and, since they had the balance of power, any further effort to pass it was abandoned.

It was then made plain to the friends and supporters of that measure that no further attempt would be made in that direction for a long time, if ever.
I wrote and had published in the Washington _Post_ a letter in which I took strong grounds in favor of having the representation in Congress,--from States where the colored men had been practically disfranchised through an evasion of the Fifteenth Amendment,--reduced in the manner prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

In that letter I made an effort to answer every argument that had been made in opposition to such a proposition.

It had been argued by some fairly good lawyers, for instance, that the subsequent ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment had so modified the Fourteenth as to take away from Congress this optional and discretionary power which had been previously conferred upon it by the Fourteenth Amendment.