As elephants shy and shuffle before a bridge which they are about to cross, so performed our saviors before emancipation and colored troops. Emancipation and colored troops were the powder and ball which Providence had laid by the side of our guns. Sumner urged incessantly upon the administration the necessity of pouring this providential broadside into the ranks of the foe. This was done at last and treason staggered and fell mortally hurt. The gravest problem remained, however, to be solved. The riddle of the southern sphinx awaited its Oedipus. How ought local self-government to be reconstituted in the old slave states was the momentous question to be answered at close of the war. Sumner had his answer, others had their answer. His answer he framed on the simple basis of right. No party considerations entered into his straightforward purpose. He was not careful to enfold within it any scheme or suggestion looking to the ascendancy of his section. It was freedom alone that he was solicitious of establishing, the supremacy of democratic ideas and institutions in the new-born nation. He desired the ascendancy of his section and party so far only as they were the real custodians of national justice and progress. God knows whether his plan was better than the plans of others except in simpleness and purity of aim. Lincoln had his plan, Johnson his, Congress its own. Sumner's had what appears to me might have evinced it, on trial, of superior virtue and wisdom, namely, the element of time, indefinite time as a factor in the work of reconstruction. But it is impossible to speak positively on this point. His scheme was rejected and all discussion of it becomes therefore nugatory. Negro citizenship and suffrage he championed not to save the political power of his party and section, but as a duty which the republic owes to the weakest of her children because of their weakness. Equality before the law is, in fact, the only adequate defense which poverty has against property in modern civilized society. Well did Mr. Sumner understand this truth, that wrong has a fatal gift of metamorphosis, its ability to change its form without losing its identity. It had shed in America, Negro slavery. It would reappear as Negro serfdom unless placed in the way of utter extinction. He had the sagacity to perceive that equality before the law could alone avert a revival under a new name of the old slave power and system. He toiled therefore in the Senate and on the platform to make equality before the law the master principle in the social and political life of America.