“It is not only _the_ great speech of Charles Sumner’s life, but it is the great speech of the age. It is perfectly exhaustive, free from all personalities, free from all idiosyncrasies, statesmanlike, philosophical, and calculated to become a lasting memorial of its author’s research, patient investigation, power of analysis, and, above all, his undying devotion to the cause of popular liberty and human rights.” The _Progressive Age_, of Belfast, Maine, said:-- “It is beyond question the greatest effort of our most distinguished New England statesman, and will make his name dear to every friend of freedom and equal rights in all coming time. It is throughout the language of the calm, conscientious statesman. Avoiding all mere expedients and controversies concerning details, it fixes the attention upon the great principles of a free republican government; and never in our history have those principles been so clearly and forcibly elucidated.” The Bangor _Jeffersonian_, also of Maine, said:-- “In the United States Senate, on Monday and Tuesday of last week, Mr. Sumner made a speech which will occupy a very conspicuous place in the history of the American Union, not so much for its advocacy of any merely formal plan or scheme of national legislation for Reconstruction as for its closer relations to the great fundamental principles which constitute the ideal of a truly republican government It goes to the very foundation of things.” In a leading article of more than two columns, the New York _Herald_ said, in a different vein:-- “MR. SUMNER’S ORATION.--NEGRO SUFFRAGE THE WHOLE DUTY OF THE NATION, AND THE ONLY ESCAPE FROM OUR DIFFICULTIES.--Mr. Sumner, in his Senatorial pleading in the case of the negro, has given to the country an elaborate evidence of the utterly impracticable and visionary character of his political views. His oration is admirable in all purely literary respects, and indicates an abundant industry and research; but its theories of society, its interpretations of the Constitution, and its assumptions as to the history of the country and of the war are inadmissible, excepting only what is said of the Constitutional Amendment.… “Those parts of the oration which claim suffrage for the negro, as a necessary policy of the nation, will require but little answer by argument; for the country and the world--all men outside the Radical Republican party--will completely deny the truth of the points from which they start.…