Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/83

Rh of suffrage to the colored people, which they thought to be designed for their own degradation. Thus they had persuaded themselves that Charles Sumner was to them a relentless foe.

They did not know, as others knew, that he whom they cursed as their persecutor had a heart beating warmly and tenderly for all the human kind; that the efforts of his life were unceasingly devoted to those whom he thought most in need of aid; that in the slave he saw only the human soul, with its eternal title to the same right and dignity which he himself enjoyed; that he as sailed the slavemaster only as the oppressor who denied that right; and that the former oppressor ceasing to be such, and being oppressed himself, could surely count upon the fullness of his active sympathy freely given in the spirit of equal justice; that it was the religion of his life to protect the weak and oppressed against the strong, no matter who were the weak and oppressed, no matter who were the strong. They knew not that, while fiercely combating a wrong, there was not in his heart a spark of hatred even for the wrongdoer who hated him. They knew not how well he deserved the high homage in voluntarily paid to him by a cartoon during the late Presidential campaign,—a cartoon, designed to be malicious, which represented Charles Sumner strewing flowers on the grave of Preston Brooks. They foresaw not, that to welcome them back to the full brotherhood of the American people, he would expose himself to a blow, wounding him as cruelly as that which years ago levelled him to the ground in the Senate chamber. And this new blow he received for them. The people of the South ignored this long. Now that he is gone, let them never forget it.

From Europe Mr. Sumner returned late in the fall of 1872, much strengthened, but far from being well. At the opening of the session he reintroduced two measures