The New York papers publish Sumner’s late speech in full. It fills some twenty columns of small type—and, as he had been rehearsing it before a looking-glass for several weeks previous to its delivery, with a negro boy holding a candle to aid him in adjusting the action to the word, it is probable the whole abolition confederacy had the document before it was read to the Senate.
We have perused the effusion from curiosity to see what this bell-weather of fanaticism had to say for his cause. It smacks of the ravage of the maniac—and that would constitute the best apology for its abundant wickedness, but for the fact that method pervades the madness, and the madness is steeped in malignity.
We noticed that Mr. Douglas and some other Senators charged the Massachusetts senator and his abolition confederates with the design to subvert the constitution and dissolve the Union. Such would seem to be the purpose of the speaker, from the general tone of his discourse. We extract the following brief paragraph, that the reader may see what terrible evils impend over the land, if the abolitionists are not permitted to have their way.
“Already the muster has begun. The strife is no longer local, but national. Even now, while I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the horizon, threatening to darken the broad land, which already yawns with muttering of civil war. The fury of the propagandists of Slavery, and the calm determination of their opponents, are now diffused from the distant Territory over wide-spread communities, and the whole country, in all its extent—marshalling hostile divisions, and foreshadowing a strife, which, unless happily averted by the triumph of Freedom, will become war—fratricidal, parricidal war—with an accumulated wickedness beyond the wickedness of any war in human annals; justly provoking the avenging judgment of Providence and the avenging pen of history, and constituting a strife in the language of the ancient writer, more than foreign, more than social, more than civil; but something compounded of all these strifes, and in itself more than war; sed potius commune quoddam ex omnibus, et plus bellum.”
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