vice, and who charges me with leading him from the faith in a God and Mediator, in which his mother had reared him, without giving him anything else in its place, and who says he is disposed to believe in a God-which is as certain as that every effect has a cause--but does not now know the way in which to approach him. The voice cries in broken accents, "They have taken away my God, and my faith and my hope, and I know not where to find them!" It is certain that there is no God to answer the complaint, but I have faith in the development which has done so much in the past, and will do more in the future, that it will fill the void it has created. "The children have come to the birth," and what we need is one to deliver them; and I advertise for such from among our scientific doctors all over the world. AN EVOLUTIONIST. IV. A SENATOR'S FIDELITY VINDICATED. THE defeated attempt to annex San Domingo to the United States, the recall of Mr. Motley from the mission to England, the removal of Mr. Sumner from the head of the Committee on Foreign Relations, on which he had long served, the rupture of friendly intercourse subsisting between him and Mr. Fish, are likely, both in their public and personal aspects, to prove matters of permanent interest. While many contributions have been made to the discussion, the more elaborate are the letter of Mr. Fish, October 29, 1877, printed in the Boston Evening Transcript, the reply of one of Mr. Sumner's literary executors through the same journal, November 28th, and a paper of Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, in support of Mr. Fish, dated January 3, 1878, and appearing in the New York Herald. Various persons have at times had relations to the controversy; but lately it has been treated as one which chiefly concerned Mr. Fish and Mr. Sumner. Their respective claims, however, to the public esteem are not the pending question. Mr. Sumner, in 1870, resisted, in the Senate, with all his power, the annexation of San Domingo as fraught with evil to the colored race, and as promoted by measures which violated international law, while Mr. Fish strenuously supported it in the cabinet. Whether, in this or other measures on which they may have differed or agreed, one or the other is entitled to the higher rank as a statesman, is not now in dispute. The issue is a narrower one, involving chiefly the validity of the reasons alleged at different times for Mr. Sumner's removal, which the public has quite generally attributed largely to the intervention of the President, and of his Secretary of State, Mr. Fish. The discussion sweeps a wider field, but it begins and ends at this point of contention. In an interview with a reporter at Boston, October 19, 1877, Mr. Fish stated that, "with regard to the alleged negligence of Mr. Sumner while chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, it was a fact, susceptible of proof from the Senate records, that drafts of treaties [meaning treaties], from eight to eleven in number, remained in the hands of the committee for several months, some of them, as near as Mr. Fish could remember, for more than two years." In reply to a written request for a list of the treaties referred to, he answered by letter, October 29th, enumerating nine-one each with Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Austria, Salvador, and Great Britain, and two with Peru-as "transmitted to the Senate for its action, and referred by that body to the Committee on Foreign Relations, while Mr. Sumner was its chairman, and which remained unacted upon at the time when he ceased to be such chairman;" and later in the same letter he referred to the nine treaties as having "failed to receive the consideration of the committee at the time when Mr. Sumner's appointment as its chairman expired." By note of November 7th, merely correcting a date, Mr. Fish appeared a third time before the public. In an interview held at Garrison's, November 10th, with a reporter of the New York Herald, he treated with ridicule the suggestion ascribed to Wendell Phillips, that Mr. Sumner had "prepared and digested" the treaties referred to, which thus made final action only a formality, and replied, "with a certain bland smile of contempt," that, "on the contrary, he had pigeon-holed those treaties; he would pay no attention to them whatever." Again, by letter to the Herald, November 10th, evening, he supplemented with further statements what he had said to the reporter in the afternoon; thus, in the brief period of three weeks, coming before the public five times to make and support charges against Mr. Sumner, and each time with no appearance of being a reluctant witness-certainly without being governed by any self-imposed rule of silence or reserve. Before October, 1877, Mr. Fish seems to have been, not publicly but privately, making the same charge against Mr. Sumner. In an interview held early in September, en route from London to Edinburgh, General Grant stated that he had said to George William Curtis, at Long Branch, in 1871, that "Mr. Sumner had not done his duty as chairman of the committee, because he had hampered the business of the State Department by pigeon-holing |