"Three of England's greatest orators and statesmen," continued Mr. Sumner, "Burke, Canning and Brougham, at successive periods unite in declaring, from the experience of the British West Indies, that whatever the slave-masters undertook to do for their slaves was always arrant trifling; that whatever might be its plausible form it always wanted the executive principle. More recently the Emperor of Russia, in ordering the emancipation of the serfs, declared that all previous efforts had failed because they had been left to the spontaneous initiative of the proprietors." . . . "I assume that we shall not leave to the old slave-proprietors the maintenance of that freedom to which we are pledged, and thus break our own promise and sacrifice a race." In concluding his speech Mr. Sumner referred to the enormity of the wrongs against the freedmen as something that made the blood curdle. "In the name of God," said he, "let us protect them; insist upon guarantees; pass the bill under consideration; pass any bill, but do not let this crying injustice rage any longer. An avenging God cannot sleep while such things find countenance. If you are not ready to be the Moses of an oppressed people, do not become their Pharaoh." Mr. Willard Saulsbury of Delaware made a brief reply to Mr. Sumner, not so much to argue the points put forward by the senator from Massachusetts, not so much to deny the facts related by him or to discuss the principles which he had presented, as to announce that "it can be no longer disguised that there is in the party which elected the President an opposition party to him. Nothing can be more antagonistic than the suggestions contained in his Message and the speeches already made in both Houses of Congress." He adjured the President to be true and faithful to the principles he had foreshadowed, and pledged him "the support of two million men in the States which have not been in revolt, and who did not support him for his high office."