PREAMBLE AND RESOLUTIONS.
Chas. Sumner is dead. What a terrible blow to them to whose welfare he devoted a brilliant and useful life. A great expounder of the constitution, he became indeed the champion of our race. In his death the United States Senate has lost its brightest gem, Massachussetts a noble and honorable son, and the country its greatest statesman. Let the people mourn—for their loss is great.
Mr. Sumner may well be considered as having reached the apex of American statesmanship, and will be deservedly enshrined in the true American heart for his honesty and purity of character; his wisdom and sense of justice, his love of truth and virtue, the sublimity of his eloquence and the greatness of his knowledge. His name will always be proudly remembered and cherished in the palaces of the wealthy, and the homes of the poor and the lowly. Yet there are some who will not praise him now, but their children's children will be taught to emulate the knowledge and principles of the American statesman whose demise we now so sadly mourn.
Charles Sumner devoted his life—one that was full of hope and brightness in the future, to the purification of the government of his country. From the commencement of his public career, the noble determination to make the declaration of independence a living fact instead of a brazen mockery, has occupied his closest attention and called forth his most powerful efforts; how he succeeded cannot be better illustrated than in our action to-day. Standing in the senate of the United States, he was a terror to evil doers and to tyrants, who faltered and cowered before his withering denunciations of the crime of slavery, and his vivid picture of universal freedom, pictured with all the earnestness and eloquence of which he was master. And this, too, at a time when it was dangerous even for a congressman of the United States to express his honest convictions based upon the first principles of the government, that all men were created equal and endowed by their Creator, with certain inalienable
