In the present administration, as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Sumner has with his usual learning and power defended American honor against the causeless defamations and sneers of those who should have known better. None of our public men, perhaps, is more favorably known in the Old World. His talents and accomplishments, as well as his heroic stand for principle, have given him the familiar _entrée_ to all that is best worth knowing in England; and it is for that reason more admirable that he should, with such wealth of learning and elegance of diction, have remonstrated with that great nation on her injustice to us. His pamphlet on "Our Foreign Relations" carries a weight of metal in it that is overpowering; it is as thoroughly exhaustive of the subject as any of his greatest speeches,--grave, grand, and severely true. It is the strong blood of England herself speaking back to the parent land as sorrowfully as Hamlet to his mother. In the recent debates on Reconstruction, Sumner has remained true to that "chastity of honor" in relation to the United States Constitution, which has been characteristic of him, in opposing that short sighted republican policy which proposed to secure the political privileges of the blacks by introducing the constitutional amendment, providing that any state disfranchising negroes should be deprived of a corresponding portion of its representation in Congress. Sumner indignantly repelled the suggestion of introducing any such amendments into the constitution, as working dishonor to that instrument by admitting into it, in any form, or under whatsoever pretext, the doctrine of the political inequality of races of men. In this we recognize a faultless consistency of principle. Sumner was cheered in the choice which he made in the darkest hour, by that elastic hope in the success of the right, which is the best inheritance of a strong, and healthy physical and moral organization. During the time of the Fugitive Slave Law battle, while the conflict of his election was yet uncertain, he was speaking incidentally to a friend of the tremendous influences which the then regnant genius of Daniel Webster could bring to crush any young man who opposed him. He spoke with feeling of what had to be sacrificed by a Boston young man who set himself to oppose such influences. The friend, in reply, expressed some admiration of his courage and self-sacrificing. He stopped, as he was walking up and down the room, and said, with simplicity, "Courage! No, it doesn't require so very much courage, because I know that in a few years we shall have all this thing down under our feet. We shall set our heel upon it," and he emphasized the sentence by bringing his heel heavily down upon the carpet. "Do you really think so?" "I know so; of course we shall."