"The outlawry of all Northern men of known hostility to slavery--the numberless pro-slavery mobs and lynchings, her defiant and awful defence of the traffic in human flesh, her increasing rigor and cruelties towards the slaves, and finally her horrible treason and rebellion to secure her independence as a vast slaveholding empire, through all time, all mightily helped to defeat her impious purpose and to hasten the year of jubilee. Thus it is that God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform; He plants his footsteps in the sea, And rides upon the storm. And who but God is to be glorified? [Illustration: Charles Sumner] CHAPTER IV. CHARLES SUMNER. Mr. Sumner an Instance of Free State High Culture--The "Brahmin Caste" of New England--The Sumner Ancestry; a Kentish Family --Governor Increase Sumner; His Revolutionary Patriotism--His Stately Presence; "a Governor that can Walk"--Charles Sumner's Father--Mr. Sumner's Education, Legal and Literary Studies --Tendency to Ideal Perfection--Sumner and the Whigs-- Abolitionism Social Death--Sumner's Opposition to the Mexican War--His Peace Principles--Sumner opposes Slavery Within the Constitution, as Garrison Outside of it--Anti-Slavery and the Whigs--The Political Abolitionist Platform--Webster asked in vain to Oppose Slavery--Sumner's Rebuke of Winthrop--Joins the Free Soil Party--Succeeds Webster in the Senate--Great Speech against the Fugitive Slave Law--The Constitution a Charter of Liberty--Slavery not in the Constitution--First Speech after the Brooks Assault--Consistency as to Reconstruction. In the example of Abraham Lincoln we have shown the working man, self-educated, rising to greatness and station, under influences purely American. It is our pride to say that in no other country of the world could a man of the working classes have had a career like that of Lincoln. We choose now another name made famous by the great struggle for principle and right which has ended in our recent war. As Lincoln is a specimen of the facilities, means of self-education and advance in life which America gives to the working man, so Charles Sumner is a specimen of that finish, breadth, and extent of culture which could be produced by the best blood and the best educational institutions of the oldest among the _free_ States of America.