organized governments in themselves, every one full of energy, conscious of strength, full of valor, fond of war-instead of growing first jealous, then hostile, like the tribes of Greece after the Persian had retired, like the cities of Italy at the dawn of the modern world—are melted into one, so that for centuries of internal peace the grand agencies of amelioration and advancement shall operate unimpeded; the rain and dew of heaven descending on ground better and still better prepared to admit them; the course of time, the providence of God, leading on that noiseless progress whose wheels shall not turn back, whose consummation shall be in the brightness of the latter day. What achievement of man may be compared with this achievement? For the slave alone, what promises half so much? And this is not glorious enough for the ambition of philanthropy !

No, fellow citizens, the first of men are the builders of empires. Here is, my friends, here, right here-in doing something in our day and generation toward "forming a more perfect union"; in doing something by literature, by public speech, by sound industrial policy, by the careful culture of fraternal love and regard, by the intercourse of business and friendship, by all the means within our command, in doing something to leave the Union, when we die, stronger than we found it-here, here is the field of our grandest duties and highest rewards. Let the grandeur of such duties, let the splendor of such rewards, suffice us. Let them reconcile and constrain us to turn from that equivocal philanthropy which violates contracts, which tramples on law, which confounds the whole subordination of virtues, which counts it a light thing that a nation is rent asunder, and the swords of brothers sheathed in the bosoms of brothers, if thus the chains of one slave may be violently and prematurely broken.

CHARLES SUMNER

THE CRIME AGAINST KANSAS

Charles Sumner, the greatest advocate of the anti-slavery cause in Congress, was born in Boston, January 6, 1811. Distinguished at school and college, he took his Harvard degree in 1830, and adopted the career of the law. He was better adapted to the literary side of legal practice, and employed much time in writing for legal papers and editing The Jurist. In 1837 he went to Europe to study the judicial practice of foreign countries. On July 4, 1845, he delivered the annual oration before the civil authorities of Boston on "The True Grandeur of Nations," in which the impending war with Mexico was strongly condemned and the slave power as the inciting cause of the war vigorously arraigned. Four months later he made in Faneuil Hall his first speech as an anti-slavery advocate. He took his seat in the upper house of the national Congress December 1, 1851, and became known as the champion of the anti-slavery sentiment in Congress. In February, 1854, he addressed the Senate on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and on the nineteenth and twentieth of May, 1856, delivered his speech, "The Crime against Kansas," arousing opposition, to which he replied contemptuously, especially singling out Senators Butler and Douglas. The result was a personal attack in the Senate chamber, made by Preston S. Brooks, a nephew of Butler. Sumner seemed never to recover fully from this serious assualt. He died in 1874. Another speech by Mr. Sumner is in Volume III.

MR. PRESIDENT:-You are now called to redress a great transgression. Seldom in the history of nations has such a question been presented. Tariffs, army bills, navy bills, land bills, are important, and justly occupy your care; but these all belong to the course of ordinary legislation. As means and instruments only, they are necessarily subordinate to the conservation of government itself. Grant them or deny them, in greater or less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The ma

chinery of government will continue to move. The state will not cease to exist. Far otherwise is it with the eminent question now before you, involving, as it does, liberty in a broad territory, and also involving the peace of the whole country, with our good name in history for evermore.

Take down your map, sir, and you will find that the Territory of Kansas, more than any other region, occupies the middle spot of North America, equally distant from the Atlantic on the east, and the Pacific on the west; from the frozen waters of Hudson's Bay on the north, and the tepid Gulf stream on the south, constituting the precise territorial center of the whole vast continent. To such advantages of situation, on the very highway between two oceans, are added a soil of unsurpassed richness, and a fascinating, undulating beauty of surface, with a health-giving climate, calculated to nurture a powerful and generous people, worthy to be a central pivot of American institutions. A few short months only have passed since this spacious and mediterranean country was open only to the savage who ran wild in its woods and prairies; and now it has already drawn to its bosom a population of freemen larger than Athens crowded within her historic gates, when her sons, under Miltiades, won liberty for mankind on the field of Marathon; more than Sparta contained when she ruled Greece, and sent forth her devoted children, quickened by a mother's benediction, to return with their shields, or on them; more than Rome gathered on her seven hills, when, under her kings, she commenced that sovereign sway, which afterward embraced the whole earth; more than London held, when, on the fields of Crecy and Agincourt, the English banner was carried victoriously over the chivalrous hosts of France.

Against this territory, thus fortunate in position and population, a crime has been committed, which is without example in the records of the past. Not in plundered provinces or in the cruelties of selfish governors will you find its parallel; and yet there is an ancient instance, which may show at least the path of justice. In the terrible impeachment by which the great Roman orator has blasted through all time the name of Verres, amid charges of robbery and sacrilege, the enormity which most aroused the indignant voice of his accuser, and

which still stands forth with strongest distinctness, arresting the sympathetic indignation of all who read the story, is, that away in Sicily he had scourged a citizen of Rome-that the cry, “I am a Roman citizen," had been interposed in vain against the lash of the tyrant governor. Other charges were that he had carried away productions of art, and that he had violated the sacred shrines. It was in the presence of the Roman senate that this arraignment proceeded; in a temple of the forum; amid crowds-such as no orator had ever before drawn together-thronging the porticos and colonnades, even clinging to the housetops and neighboring slopes-and under the anxious gaze of witnesses summoned from the scene of crime. But an audience grander far-of higher dignity-of more various people, and of wider intelligence-the countless multitude of succeeding generations, in every land, where eloquence has been studied, or where the Roman name has been recognized-has listened to the accusation, and throbbed with condemnation of the criminal. Sir, speaking in an age of light, and a land of constitutional liberty, where the safeguards of elections are justly placed among the highest triumphs of civilization, I fearlessly assert that the wrongs of much-abused Sicily, thus memorable in history, were small by the side of the wrongs of Kansas, where the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, have been desecrated; where the ballot-box, more precious than any work, in ivory or marble, from the cunning hand of art, has been plundered; and where the cry, "I am an American citizen," has been interposed in vain against outrage of every kind, even upon life itself. Are you against sacrilege? I present it for your execration. Are you against robbery? I hold it up to your scorn. Are you for the protection of American citizens? I show you how their dearest rights have been cloven down, while a tyrannical usurpation has sought to install itself on their very necks!

But the wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which promoted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery; and it may be clearly traced

to a depraved longing for a new slave state, the hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the national government. Yes, sir, when the whole world, alike Christian and Turk, is rising up to condemn this wrong, and to make it a hissing to the nations, here in our Republic, force-aye, sir, FORCE-has been openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power. There is the simple fact, which you will in vain attempt to deny, but which in itself presents an essential wickedness that makes other public crimes seem like public virtues.

But this enormity, vast beyond comparison, swells to dimensions of wickedness which the imagination toils in vain to grasp, when it is understood that for this purpose are hazarded the horrors of intestine feud not only in this distant territory, but everywhere throughout the country. Already the muster has begun. The strife is no longer local, but national. Even now, while I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the horizon threatening to darken the broad land, which already yawns with the mutterings of civil war. The fury of the propagandists of slavery, and the calm determination of their opponents, are now diffuse from the distant territory over widespread communities, and the whole country, in all its extent-marshaling hostile divisions, and foreshadowing a strife which, unless happily averted by the triumph of freedom, will become warfratricidal, parricidal war-with an accumulated wickedness beyond the wickedness of any war in human annals, justly provoking the avenging judgment of Providence and the avenging pen of history, and constituting a strife, in the language of the ancient writer, more than foreign, more than social, more than civil; but something compounded of all these strifes, and in itself more than war; sed potius commune quoddam ex omnibus, et plus quam bellum.

Such is the crime, and such is the criminal, which it is my duty in this debate to expose, and, by the blessing of God, this duty shall be done completely to the end.