C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

1 In reply to the question, ‘What will be the end of all this?’ from a Senator whose heart was only half with us at this time, I addressed the following reply—which Mr. Sumner so warmly approved of. I will reproduce it here.

‘How is it to end?’

As all the other great wrongs of the world have ended,—not in blood merely; for men spill that freer than water over trifles,—but by exterminating the power and the works of the wrong-doer, and, if necessary, the wrong-doer himself.

This does not mean half as much as God means when he has traitors to deal with. History, the sacred chronicler from the grave, is Heaven's secretary. Open his books, and see how the Ruler of nations treats bad leaders of communities and empires.

What became of a polluted world when its Maker could find no place in his great heart to screen or hold its bad people any longer?

He drowned them! So your Bible tells you.

What became of his own chosen people, for whom he had wrought miracles by land and water, to whom he had committed his holy tabernacle,—the evidence of his divine presence by night and day in the everlasting flame, that never ceased to burn over the altar of his holy temple, telling that the Protector of Israel was there,— his chosen people, on whom he had lavished the wealth of his kingdom, and to whom he at last gave the most precious gem in his diadem, his ‘eternally begotten and well-beloved Son’? Read the fate of that chosen people wherever the winds of heaven sweep, and, innumerable although they be, they are among the nations only chaff on the summer threshing-floor.

What became of the Egyptian tyrant after he rejected the counsels of the great Hebrew statesman and set himself up against Moses' ‘proclamation of emancipation’?

Drowning again. What became of Sodom and Gomorrah? Brimstone and fire.

What became of Babylon and Nineveh, Tyre and Sidon, and all the great empires and states of antiquity? Any Sunday—school scholar can answer these questions. They did wrong; they persisted in wrong; they insulted God and ground his helpless ones into the dust. They were foretold their fate; they met it, and wound up their history, falling charred corpses into their sepulchres; and future Layards and Champollions have busied themselves in digging away with Birmingham picks and spades, to heave up from the ashes of ages some few remains of these triflers with ‘the divine humanity.’

Modern history tells the same story; for God is just as much the Governor of all the earth to-day, as he was before the Caesars. No new dispensation has been granted to nations. It is graven among the pandects of eternity that ‘the nation that will not serve me shall perish.’

Heaven's code never changes. The decisions of that Court of final Appeals are never reversed.

Charles I. of England did not understand this philosophy. His ignorance cost him his head from the window of Palace Hall.

Louis XVI. did not understand it; and his head rolled from the guillotine in Paris.

So have a whole regal mob of the oppressors of mankind, sooner or later, from Tarquin to Louis, been sent to their doom by the swift judgment of Heaven.

Modern nations have followed the same road as ancient empires wherever they have violated the great laws of civic prosperity and endurance. They have gone to ruin over the same beaten track where the dead dynasties of the past had left their bones.

No statesman will pretend, be he saint or sinner, that a man or a nation can contend against the Almighty and prosper. Justice and freedom are the fundamental statutes of God's system of jurisprudence. Neither men nor nations are exempt. These laws never change; and, thank God, we strike solid bottom when we are dealing with Him!

Whatever may have been the pretexts of this Rebellion, every man who is not wilfully blind saw its immediate object in the beginning. But, separation once effected, was not the ultimate design equally clear?— the establishment and consolidation of a colossal meridional empire, stretching from the free States of this Union towards the south, absorbing Mexico and Central America, Cuba, and all the islands of the surrounding archipelago, and appropriating all the South American States east of the Andes?

This empire was to rest on African Slavery as its basis, and its wealth and power were to spring from a complete monopoly of cotton, and the principal tropical products of the world.

Nor would the ultimate achievement have been beyond the regions of probability, had the leaders been allowed to break away from their allegiance and ‘go in peace.’

They contemplated nothing impossible in the gradual absorption of these vast territories, partly by arms, and partly by treaties of annexation. They would have been only re-establishing African slavery where it had but recently been abolished, more by the shock of revolution than as a reform in the gradual progress of society. They would have encountered no unconquerable obstacles in the re-establishment of domestic slavery for a while at least. Slavery is congenial to the tastes of the Spanish and Portuguese nations, and in full harmony with the lower civilization which exists among their mixed American descendants.

Besides, they would have readily found an ally in Cuba, which, on fair terms, would gladly have joined this gigantic Power, and, asserting her independence, as all the other Spanish-American states had done, sprung to the alliance to assert her freedom, and save her half a million of slaves.

Stepping on the South American continent, this new Power would have trodden triumphantly over a score of torn and shattered Republics on its march to Brazil, where it would have hoped to find a cordial ally and partner in that vast but youthful empire.

Thus the only slave-holders and the only slave-empires of the earth would have met, and reared a structure which might have arrested for an age the progress of meridional American regions.

Something far less strange than this would be, had long been history. The civilization of ages was overthrown, and to all appearances the world's march was arrested for a thousand years. The combination of barbaric forces has often proved for the time too mighty for civilization. Even Christ's temples have been overthrown in a hundred nations, and thirty generations, embracing uncounted hundreds of millions, have ever since been groping in heathen darkness around their ruins. Although the mighty stream of human progress, as a volume, moves steadily on, yet some of its vast eddies move backward before their waters can once more mingle in the general current.

Such a concentration of all the elements of barbaric power, with all the irresistible appliances of modern inventions, could, by the forced labor of the enslaved and dependent classes, have reared a structure against which not only the puny shafts of refined nations would have struck in vain, but which would have overshadowed other states and ruled for a while sovereign of the ascendant.

No meaner vision than this rested on the eyes of the projectors of the Southern rebellion. The only difficult step in the accomplishment of this stupendous scheme was the first one,—secession from the Government of the United States. This was to prove an impossibility. All the rest would have followed at half the cost in blood and treasure which the South has already expended during the first two years of the war. The total enslavement of the depressed classes, and the creation of a powerful oligarchy of coadjutors, would have rapidly crystallized all the incoherent elements of society throughout all those semi-barbarous and revolution-devastated countries. Order would have sprung from chaos; but it would have been the order which reigns in the realms of tyrants; wealth would have been multiplied by magic, but it would have been the fruit of involuntary and hopeless toil. But such did not happen to be the will of Heaven. This virgin continent was not destined to so horrible a prostitution. The clock of Time was not to go back again a thousand years.