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was no longer possible.
Many of his friends found the current too strong for them; his own party deserted him; even the Legislature of his own State turned against him in a senseless and irrational manner.
Still his spirit was unconquerable, and he continued to face the storm as long as life was in him. It was a magnificent spectacle.
It was the last battlefield of a veteran warrior, and although Sumner retired from it with a mortal wound, he had the satisfaction of winning a glorious victory.
No end could have been more appropriate to such a life.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Since Richard Coeur de Leon forgave Bertram de Gordon, who caused his death, there has never been a more magnanimous man than Charles Sumner.
Once when L. Maria Child was anathematizing Preston S. Brooks in his presence, he said: “You should not blame him. It was slavery and not Brooks that struck me. If Brooks had been born and brought up in New England, he would no more have done the thing he did than Caleb Cushing would have done it,” --Cushing always being his type of a pro-slavery Yankee.
In 1871 Charles W. Slack, the editor of the Boston Commonwealth, for whom Sumner had obtained a lucrative office, turned against his benefactor in order to save his position.
When
1905. E. P. DUtton and Co. Boston,.
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