Here was a great question of justice, appealing to the highest sentiments, and involving the best interests of the country; but lawyers, instinctive for the dialectics of the profession, forgot everlasting truth, never to be forgotten with impunity.
Sumner highlights the conflict between legal technicalities and the pursuit of justice in significant matters.
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The devices of party can no longer stave it off.
They belong to a system so essentially irrational, that all the admitted virtues of many of its agents cannot save it from judgment.
Nay, more,--if it would be criminal in these several clusters of States to reëstablish the Institution of War as Arbiter of Justice, then is it criminal in the Commonwealth of Nations to continue it.
Out of this pernicious prejudice have proceeded that persecution and neglect which are the too frequent lot of the world's pioneers.
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