Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 05 (of 20)Sumner, Charles
History
Charles Sumner: his complete works, volume 05 (of 20)
Sumner, Charles
Slavery -- United States; Speeches, addresses, etc., American
Sir, from the earliest times, men have recognized the advantages of
organization, as an effective agency in promoting the business of
life. Especially at this moment, there is no interest, public or
private, high or low, of charity or trade, of luxury or convenience,
which does not seek its aid. Men organize to rear churches and to make
pins,--to build schools and to sail ships,--to construct roads and to
manufacture toys,--to spin cotton and to print books,--to weave cloths
and to increase harvests,--to provide food and to distribute light,--to
influence Public Opinion and to secure votes,--to guard infancy
in its weakness, old age in its decrepitude, and womanhood in its
wretchedness; and now, in all large towns, when death has come, they
are buried by organized societies, and, emigrants to another world,[84]
they lie down in pleasant places, adorned by organized skill. To
complain that this prevailing principle has been applied to living
emigration is to complain of Providence and the irresistible tendencies
implanted in man.
This application of the principle is no recent invention, brought forth
for an existing emergency. It has the best stamp of Antiquity. It
showed itself in the brightest days of Greece, where colonists moved
in organized bands. It became part of the mature policy of Rome, where
bodies of men were constituted expressly for this purpose,--_triumviri
ad colonos deducendos_.[85] Naturally it is accepted in modern times
by every civilized state. With the sanction of Spain, an association
of Genoese merchants first introduced slaves to this continent. With
the sanction of France, the Society of Jesuits stretched their labors
over Canada and the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. It was under the
auspices of Emigrant Aid Companies that our country was originally
settled by the Pilgrim Fathers of Plymouth, by the Adventurers of
Virginia, and by the philanthropic Oglethorpe, whose “benevolent soul,”
commemorated by Pope, sought to plant a Free State in Georgia. At this
day, such associations, of humbler character, are found in Europe, with
offices in the great capitals, through whose activity emigrants are
directed hither.
For a long time, emigration to the West, from the Northern and
Middle States, but particularly from New England, has been of marked
significance. In quest of better homes, annually it presses to the
unsettled lands, in numbers counted by tens of thousands; but this
has been done heretofore with little knowledge, and without guide
or counsel. Finally, when, by the establishment of a government in
Kansas, the tempting fields of that central region were opened to
the competition of peaceful colonization, and especially when it
was declared that the question of Freedom or Slavery there was to
be determined by the votes of actual settlers, then at once was
organization enlisted as an effective agency in quickening and
conducting the emigration impelled thither, and, more than all, in
providing homes on its arrival.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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