Mr.
Solicitor Whiting, having examined those instructions, admits to me that "the faith of the Government was thereby pledged to every officer and soldier under that call." Surely, if this fact were understood, every man in the nation would see that the Government is degraded by using for a year the services of the brave soldiers, and then repudiating the contract under which they were enlisted.

This is what will be done, should Mr.Wilson's bill, legalizing the back pay of the army, be defeated.
We presume too much on the supposed ignorance of these men.

I have never yet found a man in my regiment so stupid as not to know when he was cheated.

If fraud proceeds from Government itself, so much the worse, for this strikes at the foundation of all rectitude, all honor, all obligation.
Mr.Senator Fessenden said, in the debate on Mr.Wilson's bill, January 4, that the Government was not bound by the unauthorized promises of irresponsible recruiting officers.

But is the Government itself an irresponsible recruiting officer?
and if men have volunteered in good faith on the written assurances of the Secretary of War, is not Congress bound, in all decency, either to fulfill those pledges or to disband the regiments?
Mr.Senator Doolittle argued in the same debate that white soldiers should receive higher pay than black ones, because the families of the latter were often supported by Government What an astounding statement of fact is this! In the white regiment in which I was formerly an officer (the Massachusetts Fifty-First) nine tenths of the soldiers' families, in addition to the pay and bounties, drew regularly their "State aid." Among my black soldiers, with half-pay and no bounty, not a family receives any aid.