By this sign conquer: by fidelity to declared principles, by the performance of all promises, by a good name.
Charles Sumner
The Public Record
Charles Sumner was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery, and after the war he was a key figure in the Reconstruction era, during which he and other Radical Republicans successfully fought to end slavery and ensure basic rights for Black Americans. He continued advocating for racial equality until his death, lobbying in his final days for a civil rights bill that served as a model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians credit Sumner with coining the phrase "equality before the law," which he first used as part of an early attempt to integrate Boston's public school system.
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Nothing captivates more than the example of virtue,--not even the example of vice.
It is nothing less than the good name of the Republic, and its character as an example to the Nations.
If one Commandment enjoins upon us not to worship any graven image, does not another say expressly, “Thou shalt not steal”?
And now that, by the blessing of God, we are banishing that terrible wrong which was so long the curse and shame of our Nation, let us apply ourselves to this other servitude, whose yoke we are all condemned to bear in daily life.
Nothing short of that servitude which denies God-given rights can be more wretched than the servitude of an uncertain currency.
How often are we told by the lawyers, in a saying handed down from antiquity, that “a wretched servitude exists where the law is uncertain”!
So long as the currency continues in its present uncertainty, it cannot answer the demands of business.
Therefore, for the poor, and for all who labor, do I now plead, when I ask that you shall not hearken to this painful proposition.
The rich may, for the time, live from their abundance; but the less favored class can have no such refuge.
It is hard to think of the poor, or of those who depend on daily wages, under the trials of this condition.
Business would be disorganized, values would be uncertain; nobody would know that the paper in his pocket to-day would buy a dinner to-morrow.
Not a bank, not a corporation, not an institution of charity, which would not suffer,--each sweeping multitudes into the abyss which it could not avoid.
Similar misconduct among us must result in similar consequences, with all the tragedies of bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy has its tragedies hardly inferior to those which throb beneath the “sceptred pall.
Talk of taxation; here is an annual tax of millions imposed by these praters of Repudiation.
If nobody had breathed Repudiation, we should all be richer, and the national debt would be at a lower interest, saving to the Nation millions of dollars annually.
Just in proportion as this is discredited, the Nation is degraded and impoverished.
Do you seek stability in the currency, with the assurance of solid business, so that extravagance and gambling speculations shall cease?
No subtlety of technicality, no ingenuity of citation, no skill in arranging texts of statutes, can make it anything else.
The cheat of paying interest-bearing bonds in promises without interest is kindred in character to that of taxing the bonds.
This benign principle, borrowed from the Laws of War, cannot be out of place in the Laws of Peace; and I invoke it now as a sufficient protection against taxation of the bonds, even if common sense in its plainest lessons, and the rule of…
His claims are doubly binding who trusts to the rectitude of another.” This is only according to an admitted principle in the Laws of War, constraining the stronger power to the best of faith in dealing with a weaker power, because the…
There is another reason, founded on the helpless condition of the creditor, who has no power to enforce his claim, whether of principal or interest.
As the transaction is vast, and especially as the Nation is conspicuous, what is done becomes an example to the world which history cannot forget.
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