Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/171

SUMNEP less degree, and you will inflict no shock. The machinery 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 coun- try, with our good name in history for ever more. 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, consti- tuting 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 fas- cinating, undulating beauty of surface, with a health-giving climate, calculated to nurture a dieted that civil war would come at once. Sumner was long inca- pacitated for further work, remaining absent from the Senate nearly four years. An effort was made in the Elouse to erpel Brooks. He was censured, but the necessary two-thirds vote for expulsion could not be secured. Brooks then resigned (on July ^4), but was reelected by his district in South Carolina, receiving all the votes cast except six, and on August 1 took his seat again. The judgment of later times on Sumner's speech as an attack on Butler, has not been favorable to Sumner. Rhodes says: "The vi- tuperation was unworthy of him and his cause, and the allusion to Butler's condition while speaking (Butler being absent from Wash- ington at the time), ungenerous and Pharisaical." Seward read the speech before its delivery, and in vain advised a toning down of the oflfensive remarks. Abridged. IX— 11 161