Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/173

 SUMNER stands forth with strongest distinctness, arrest- ing the sympathetic indignation of all who read the story, is, that away in Sicily he had scourged a citizen of Rome — that the cry, * ' I am a Roman citizen," had been interposed in vain against the lash of the tyrant governor. Other charges were that he had carried away productions of art, and that he had violated the sacred shrines. It was in the presence of the Roman Senate that this arraignment proceeded; in a temple of the Forum ; amid crowds — such as no orator had ever before drawn together — thronging the por- ticos and colonnades, even clinging to the house- tops and neighboring slopes — and under the anxious gaze of witnesses summoned from the scene of crime. But an audience grander far — of higher dig- nity — of more various people, and of wider in- telligence — the countless multitude of succeeding generations, in every land where eloquence has been studied, or where the Roman name has been recognized — has listened to the accusation, and throbbed with condemnation of the crimi- nal. Sir, speaking in an age of light, and a land of constitutional liberty, where the safeguards of elections are justly placed among the highest triumphs of civilization, I fearlessly assert that the wrongs of much-abused Sicily, thus memor- able in history, were small by the side of the wrongs of Kansas, where the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any hea- then altar, have been desecrated; where the bal- 163