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general Government. But on no subject did Mr. Sumner display the majesty of a statesman, and dwell in such convincing power as he did on giving the negro the ballot. Here he showed the resources of his exhaustless intellect as no other statesman living did or could. He challenged the world—he met our foes from every clime and of every dialect, he rebutted their objections by quotations from the reformers of all nations, he made the moralists, the poets, the theologians, the jurists, the scientialists, and the axiomatics of every age and clime contribute to this object. He could spare blood to wash the Senate of the United States, and brain-force to deluge the world with ideas. True, he never led a party, but he led the nation—he was greater than a party, besides he lived too far in advance of his contemporaries to lead a party, however noble its aims and commendable its cause; but like a pilot boat he found the channel for the ship of State, and dragged her after him with a slow but a sure glide.
Mr. Sumner had no personal relations he could not sever when they stood in the way of duty, for he would fight his personal friends as hard when he thought them wrong as he would his bitterest foes. Nor did he couch before either power or popularity, he cared no more for a President than for a peasant, if he thought them wrong, duty first and friendship second was his motto. He pinched President Johnson so during his treacherous administration that on one occasion the President got tight, and named him personally in a drunken carousal from the steps of the White House. He even frightened President Grant so about San Domingo that he has been afraid to mention the name since.
Mr. Sumner was not only a man of the finest theories, but he gave practicalization to all his professions. He professed to be a humanitarian, and he carried it out to the very letter. While he lived in the most superb splendor, in a mansion in which there was nothing wanting in the range of human conception, yet that mansion was as free to the blackest negro as to an English lord.
While his high polish and great refinement made him an aristocrat in the eyes of the masses, yet he felt as much gratification in taking a black man by the arm and perambulating the streets, as he would to be in the train of royal pomp. A few years ago, when on a visit to Washington with Mr.
