of Congressional speaking. It is composed-and this fact must be kept in mind—with the object of pacifying the mutual, rapidly increasing hostility of the two sections of the country. To what extent the desire of personal advancement was mingled in Webster's mind with more creditable incentives, it may not be perfectly easy to determine. But the existence of more creditable motives it is impossible to disprove. The tone is perfectly dispassionate. From beginning to end it is a tone of studied moderation. The review of the history of slavery, of the opinions entertained respecting it in earlier and later times, at the South and the North, and of the steps taken by the South, with the aid of the Northern Democracy, to spread the institution over new territory, is masterly in its condensation and clearness. There is little or nothing in this portion of the speech of which a Northern Anti-slavery man could reasonably complain. Moreover, Mr. Webster avowed his inflexible opposition to the further extension of slavery. The principal grounds of complaint against him were his willingness to relinquish the Wilmot Proviso on the alleged ground that it was not needed, and, under the circumstances, would be regarded at the South as a taunt and a reproach, and his professed intention to support the Fugitive Slave Law "with all its provisions to the fullest extent." But he added another qualification, which his critics seldom quote-" with some amendments." He appears to have wished to have a provision for a trial by jury in the case of a runaway slave; yet he did not subsequently insist upon it. He expressed the opinion that it properly belonged to the States, and not to the central government, to enact measures for carrying out the provision of the Constitution on this subject; but, he said, the Supreme Court had decided otherwise. Hateful as the obligation was felt to be to send back fugitives to servitude, Mr. Webster, as a constitutional lawyer, and as a Senator, undertaking to review the grounds of complaint both on the side of the North and of the South, could not avoid a frank recognition of the obnoxious stipulation by which the North was bound. On the whole, in judging of Mr. Webster's speech, the question to be decided is whether

at that particular juncture in our national history, a pacifying effort, a palliative, was or was not on the whole desirable; whether it was or was not the fit occasion for the great Northern leader to assume such a tone and take such a position as would have rallied and combined the opponents of slavery-extension and the cognate measures of the Slave Power, and would have raised their ardor and determination to a higher pitch. Possibly the hour has not even yet arrived for history to deliver on this question its final verdict.

The nomination of General Taylor and the refusal of the nominating convention to sanction the Wilmot Proviso was attended by the secession of a portion of the Whigs and by the organization of the Free Soil Party. Sumner was one of the noble band of leaders in Massachusetts, and connected with him were Adams, Stephen C. Phillips, Wilson, Charles Allen, and a few others. This was the germ of the Republican party. The Free Soilers had sufficient strength in the Massachusetts legislature to enable them, in alliance with the Democrats, to defeat Mr. Winthrop and to send Mr. Sumner to the Senate, where he took his seat in 1851. His election was effected without any attempt of his own to secure the place. He was never an intriguing politician, and, gratified as he was by high public office, he was never an office-seeker. In leaving his home for the arduous and responsible duties of his new station, his mind was profoundly affected with feelings of seriousness, amounting to sadness, which found expression in tears.

In the Senate, Mr. Sumner, as concerns "the burning question" of the times, was long in a hopeless minority. His influence on legislative measures generally was insignificant. The fact, however, was that his own mind was taken up with one absorbing theme. It was the period when the clouds were gathering which, not many years after, were to break forth in the tempest of civil war. The speeches which he made had no perceptible effect on the body of which he was a member, but they had an important effect on the country, and to the country they were in reality addressed. They served to diffuse and inflame the moral condemnation and hatred of slavery, and thus to contribute

the materials for a more intense and wide-spread spirit of antagonism in the North when at length the slaveholding States took up arms. At the outset and afterwards, the influence of the "old-line abolitionists," as the school of Mr. Garrison were often called, was not without a marked effect on Mr. Sumner's course. They complained that he did not open his mouth earlier on the floor of the Senate and give up the temporary reserve, which he rightly judged to be the dictate of prudence. That he should wish to gratify this class of the enemies of slavery was natural; but it is doubtful whether their influence on him was altogether beneficial. Left to himself, he might not improbably have spoken with equal efficiency, and yet in a more temperate strain. The fearlessness of Mr. Sumner commended him to the favor of Northerners who were exasperated at the long continued and often unrebuked, or timidly rebuked, insolence of Southern champions in the halls of Congress. When he became the victim of a cowardly and cruel personal attack, he was crowned in the popular esteem with the honors of martyrdom. His heroic endurance of pain and submission to the torture of remedial measures which are admitted not to have been accordant with the medical science of to-day, drew to him a feeling of tender sympathy and respect.

With no wish to depreciate the merits of Mr. Sumner, it is only just to say that he lacked the solidity and balance. of judgment, the firm but temperate tone of Chase, the tact and humor of Hale, and the sagacity, and somewhat excessive, yet often serviceable prudence of Seward. Mr. Sumner's lack of humor was one of the striking and unfortunate defects of his mental constitution. The unsparing character of his perpetual crusade against everybody and everything identified in his thoughts with the Slave Power is illustrated in an incident to which Mr. Pierce adverts, but which he does not relate in full. Soon after Chief Justice Taney's death, in 1864, the Judiciary Committee through Senator Trumbull reported a resolution that a bust of Taney should be placed in the old Senate chamber, along with his predecessors on the Supreme Bench. Mr. Sumner was instantly on fire, objecting to the resolution, which was accordingly

postponed. As we happened to learn years ago from the best authority, he proceeded to prepare a speech in which no doubt a host of iniquitous judges would have been exhib- . ited in the pillory, and poor Taney would have been thoroughly pelted by the orator's tongue. A pile of books to fortify the harangue was gathered at the side of his desk. But the chairman of the committee, while he let these preparations go on, had concluded in his own mind not to call up the resolution. The gun was loaded to the muzzle, but there was no opportunity given to discharge it. Nine years later, as Mr. Pierce says, the measure passed the Senate unanimously and without debate.

When all proper deductions are made, the spotless purity of Mr. Sumner's character, his superiority to the allurements of flattery, his freedom from selfish dreams of ambition, and his unswerving faithfulness to the cause of human liberty, through good report and through evil report, entitle him to honor. When the Republicans acceded to power, his opportunities for usefulness as a legislator were, of course, multiplied. In reference to the foreign relations of the country, he was qualified to render in various ways important services. The years that he had spent in Europe in his youth and during his enforced absence from his seat in Congress, had brought him into an intimate acquaintance with a great number of persons of distinction both in Great Britain and on the Continent. He made good use of the advantages thus gained, for the benefit of the country. It is impossible here to examine into the unhappy alienation of Mr. Sumner from General Grant, which was the source of much mental trouble to the former, and led to important political consequences. It is probably a marked instance of "unlikes" breeding "dislikes." The rupture of Mr. Sumner's friendship with Mr. Fish is explained in full by Mr. Pierce. But, while Mr. Sumner is vindicated from certain hurtful imputations as to an alleged negligence of official duty, it is not made clear that the fault was all on one side. Mr. Sumner's labored attack on Grant, in his speech on “ Nepotism,” is one of the least pleasing of his orations of this class. It is the fruit of a laborious ransacking of books, and is pervaded by an unwholesome animus.

Whoever gives a candid attention to Mr. Sumner's speeches, or studies this excellent biography, will perceive that his judgments on grave political questions often lacked the judicial quality. They were swayed, sometimes fatally so, by the predilections of sentiment and prejudice. Thus, in the debates on reconstruction he contended with great zeal for the proposition that the denial of suffrage to the blacks would be a violation of the guarantee of a republican government made in the Constitution to the States of the Union. "His argument," says Mr. Pierce, "was that of a moralist and not of a lawyer." In the light of the history of the Constitution, his contention was almost puerile. Again, in 1864, he took the "radical ground"—the language is Mr. Pierce's (Vol. IV., p. 176)—“ that the clause in the Constitution relating to persons held to service or labor' did not apply to fugitive slaves." It is almost incredible that such a thesis should have been seriously maintained by a reputable lawyer or any other well-informed person. Once more, he was moved by his crusade against slavery and by the events of the Civil War to minimize the rights of the States to a most unwarrantable extent. "He admitted, indeed," says Mr. Pierce (Vol. IV., p. 335), "the place of States in our system, as supplying opportunities for education and meeting local wants; but he treated them as conveniences rather than essential organs of a national life, and his conception reduced them almost to the level of counties and towns." Mr. Pierce adds: "Before the civil war Sumner and other Anti-slavery leaders contended for the restriction of the powers of the national government to certain specified functions, and guarded jealously the autonomy of the States." This was the ground which Mr. Sumner took when he was fighting the Fugitive Slave Law. He was in sympathy with the uncompromising detestation of slavery which characterized Mr. Garrison, Wendell Phillips and their coadjusters, who denounced the Constitution and the Union. But he, unlike them, professed to stand within the limits of the Constitution and to be bound by its provisions. It is impossible to deny that his position was a difficult one to hold consistently, and involved embarrassment. When he affirmed in the Senate