Charles Sumner. 1811-1874, was born in Boston.  He studied at the Latin school in his native city, graduated from Harvard University at the age of nineteen, studied law at the same institution, and was admitted to practice in 1834.  He at once took a prominent position in his profession, lectured to the law classes at Cambridge for several successive years, wrote and edited several standard law books, and might have had a professorship in the law school, had he desired it.  In his famous address on “The True Grandeur of Nations,” delivered July 4, 1815, before the municipal authorities of Boston, he took strong grounds against war among nations.  In 1851 he was elected to the United States Senate and continued in that position till his death.  As a jurist, as a statesman, as an orator, and as a profound and scholarly writer, Mr. Sumner stands high in the estimation of his countrymen.  In physical appearance, Mr. Sumner was grand and imposing; men often turned to gaze after him, as he passed along the streets of his native city. ###

I need not dwell now on the waste and cruelty of war.  These stare us wildly in the face, like lurid meteor lights, as we travel the page of history.  We see the desolation and death that pursue its demoniac footsteps.  We look upon sacked towns, upon ravaged territories, upon violated homes; we behold all the sweet charities of life changed to wormwood and gall.  Our soul is penetrated by the sharp moan of mothers, sisters, and daughters—­of fathers, brothers, and sons, who, in the bitterness of their bereavement, refuse to be comforted.  Our eyes rest at last upon one of these fair fields, where Nature, in her abundance, spreads her cloth of gold, spacious and apt for the entertainment of mighty multitudes—­or perhaps, from the curious subtlety of its position, like the carpet in the Arabian tale, seeming to contract so as to be covered by a few only, or to dilate so as to receive an innumerable host.  Here, under a bright sun, such as shone at Austerlitz or Buena Vista—­amidst the peaceful harmonies of nature—­on the Sabbath of peace—­we behold bands of brothers, children of a common Father, heirs to a common happiness, struggling together in the deadly fight, with the madness of fallen spirits, seeking with murderous weapons the lives of brothers who have never injured them or their kindred.  The havoc rages.  The ground is soaked with their commingling blood.  The air is rent by their commingling cries.  Horse and rider are stretched together on the earth.  More revolting than the mangled victims, than the gashed limbs, than the lifeless trunks, than the spattering brains, are the lawless passions which sweep, tempest-like, through the fiendish tumult.

Horror-struck, we ask, wherefore this hateful contest?  The melancholy, but truthful answer comes, that this is the established method of determining justice between nations!