Mr. Sumner's defence of democratic republican ideas,--of the fitness of the European peoples for self-government,--his repulse of those unbelieving theorists who would consign the French and the Italians to the eternal doom of oppression,--are manly, powerful, and unanswerable. His hearty love of genuine democratic principles, as taught by the old republican school of statesmen and philosophers, and his zealous pride of country, which always made him one of the most intensely American, in thought, word, and deed, of all the Americans who have ever sojourned in the Old World, shine forth from every page of the Oration. And in the honest ardor of his defence of the natural and political rights of man, as they were taught by Turgot, by Montesquieu, by Jefferson, not content with declamation or rhetoric, he ploughs deep into the reasoning by which they were demonstrated or defended, and ranges wide over the fields of learning by which they were illustrated. Careful for nothing but for the truth itself, he refutes the errors of a French writer who had charged practical ingratitude on the part of America towards de Beaumarchais, the agent of the first benefactions of France to these Colonies, and arraigns and exposes the historical mistakes of Lord Brougham and of President Fillmore, unfavorable to Republican France and to Continental liberty. The crimes of Austria are shown to have been made possible by the moral support Austria has received from the government of England. The fruits of the reverses suffered by Hungary, and by other nationalities struggling for independence and popular liberty, are exhibited in the sacrifices since endured by England in the war in the Crimea, and in the embarrassments of the present hour. Among our own duties and responsibilities to the great and world-wide cause of liberty,--discussed thus far in its relations to Europe,--Mr. Sumner proceeds to present the grand duty we owe, not less to ourselves than to Europe, of giving to the struggling nations an example of government true to the memories of our National Anniversary, and to the fundamental ideas of civil freedom "implied in an independent, but rigidly responsible judiciary, and a complete separation of the legislative and judicial functions." From Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Marshall, and Story,--to say nothing of English and French jurists,--Mr. Sumner brings authority to define and illustrate the true place of the judicial office in the political system of a free government. And here, fidelity to those principles of liberty he had explained and defended, fidelity to the "good old cause" itself, at home and in the grand forum of the nations, demanded and received the frank avowal, that "a recent scene in the Supreme Court of the United States has shown that Jefferson was no false prophet, and has furnished at the same time a serious warning to all who prefer a government based upon law to either despotism or anarchy."