Charles Sumner

The colored people are not ungenerous, and therefore will incline to any measures of good-will and reconciliation; but I trust no excess of benevolence will make them consent to any postponement of those equal rights which are still…

There can be but one liberty and one equality, the same in Boston and New Orleans, the same everywhere throughout the country.

There must be complete equality before the law, so that in all institutions, agencies, or conveniences, created or regulated by law, there can be no discrimination on account of color, but a black man shall be treated as a white man.

If the “situation” is accepted in good faith, it must be entirely,--including not merely the abolition of Slavery and the establishment of equal suffrage, but also all those other rights which are still denied or abridged.

It is absurd for anybody to say that he “accepts the situation,” and then deny the equal rights of the colored man.

Above all, let them insist on the rights of their own much-abused and insulted people.

Finding me less at home than himself with his favorite humorist, he said pleasantly, “I must initiate you,” and then repeated with enthusiasm the message he had sent to the author: “For the genius to write these things I would gladly give…

Why not help the man of science, or the learned professor, who aspires to enlarge his library in this way?

For instance, take most of the considerable works of scholarship in German, annually produced, bearing on the classics; they are not republished in our country, but our professors import them at cost.

Every such work becomes a fountain in the neighborhood: but I would not put a duty on that fountain; I would unseal it; I would open it, and let it flow as amply as possible.

Why should those scholars, those enlightened professional men who import these books, be subjected to this additional expense?

My amendment reaches the large amount of works concerning science and literature and jurisprudence in ancient and in foreign languages; and why should these be subjected to a duty?

Now I ask whether we should not do all we can to make the school-books as cheap as possible?

I think, if these could be put on the free list, an essential service would be done; the revenue would lose very little, and no considerable interest in our country would suffer.

It is also the case with men of science, who desire works in the Continental languages; they complain bitterly of the expense to which they are put.

I have letters very often from learned professors in different parts of the country, complaining of the cost of books that they are constrained to purchase in order to carry on their studies and to enable them to teach.

Beyond that sentiment of duty which is with me a rule of life, I am encouraged to this effort by the hope that, even if the present Committee cannot be corrected in conformity with Parliamentary Law, its incompetency is so clearly exposed…

Seeing it as clearly as I do, and feeling it as strongly as I do, I cannot avoid expressing it.

I protest against it as constituted in flagrant violation of Parliamentary Law; and I protest especially against the acting Chairman, who undertakes to direct this inquiry and to examine witnesses, as not coming within the conditions…

A committee organized to sustain the negative is the very committee described as a nurse that cares not for the child, and therefore is a committee not tolerated by Parliamentary Law.

The prime object is opportunity and fair play for those bringing forward a proposition, or holding the affirmative.

This instructive statement is in admirable harmony with the rule, as declared in early times, that those “against the thing” cannot go on the committee,--and that a measure, like a child, is not put to a nurse that cares not for it.

When law is sacrificed, individuals may for a moment seem to triumph, but it is at the cost of a great safeguard for the good of all.

Any shock to them, as in the present case, becomes a precedent by which liberty and justice suffer.

Jefferson justly calls “the wantonness of power” is restrained, and minorities are protected against majorities.