[441] —an unusual thing in a Massachusetts Legislature,—manifestations of applause were too earnest to be readily suppressed. Again we quote the words of Horace Greeley, in an article signed by his name, in the N. Y. Independent, entitled Charles Sumner as a Statesman:
For the first time in our political history, a party has been organized and a State ticket nominated for the sole purpose of defeating the reelection of one who is not a State officer, and never aspired to be. Governor Andrew is regarded with a hostility intensified by the fewness of those who feel it; but the bitterness with which Mr. Sumner is hated insists on the gratification of a canvass, even though a hopeless one; and, since there was no existing party by which this could be attempted without manifest futility, one was organized for the purpose. And it was best that this should be. Let us have a canvass of the friends and the enemies of Mr. Sumner in the State which he has so honored. I have said, that, while Senators have shared his convictions, none has seemed so emphatically, so eminently as he, to embody and represent the growing, deepening Anti-slavery sentiment of the country. None has seemed so invariably to realize that a public wrong is a public danger; that injustice to the humblest and weakest, is peril to the well-being of all. Others have seemed to regard the recent developments of disunion and treason with surprise and alarm: he has esteemed them the bitter, but natural, fruit of the deadly tree we have so long been watering and cherishing. The profound, yet simple truth, that ‘Righteousness exalteth a nation,’—that nothing else is so baleful as injustice,—that the country which gains a large accession of territory or of wealth at the cost of violating the least tittle of the canons of eternal rectitude, has therein made a ruinous mistake,—that nothing else can be so important or so profitable as stern uprightness; such is the key-note of his lofty and beneficent career. May it be vouchsafed him to announce from his seat in the Senate the final overthrow of the demon he has so faithfully, so nobly resisted; and from Greenland to Panama, from the St. John to the Pacific, the sun in his daily course looks down on no master, and no slave!
