Charles Sumner

A hotel is a legal institution, and so is a common school, and as such each must be for the equal benefit of all.

Shut out from proper accommodation in the cars, the doors of the Senate Chamber opened to him, and there he found that equality which a railroad conductor had denied.

Can a respectable colored citizen travel on steamboats or railways, or public conveyances generally, without insult on account of color?

Wherever the law supplies a rule, there you must insist on Equal Rights.

In the first place, you must at all times insist upon your rights; and here I mean not only those already accorded, but others still denied, all of which are contained in Equality before the Law.

This is our duty, and it is all expressed in Charity.

But future magnificence, filling the imagination, will not feed the hungry and clothe the naked, nor will it provide homes for the destitute.

A great fire in other days was worse than a great fire now; for then it was borne in solitude by the place where it occurred; now the whole country rushes forward to bear it, making common cause with the sufferers.

Is there not in these examples a lesson of encouragement for Chicago sitting now in ashes?

Be it our duty to treat this calamity of individuals as the calamity of all.

According to another saying handed down by ancient philosophy, that is the best government where a wrong to a single individual is resented as an injury to all.

If the Angel Charity is not as quick of wing as the Fire-Fiend, yet it is more mighty and far-reaching.

Destruction has been swift; let your gifts be swift also.

Help for the suffering is the highest eloquence.

But the Republic is Peace,--most unlike the Empire, which was always war in disguise.

The first is Peace; and the second, which is like unto the first, is the Republic.

Plainly, at this epoch of civilization, there are two Great Commandments which this powerful nation cannot disobey with impunity.

Were all Frenchmen of his mind, the deadly war-fever would disappear, and the Republic would be established on a foundation not to be shaken; and then would France rise to glories which she has never before reached.

Knowing our honored guest by his life, I am sure that to him war is detestable, while Republican Government is his aspiration for France.

You cannot give the colored child any equivalent for equality.

I doubt if I can add materially to the argument which you have already received, but, with your permission, I ask attention to the point that equality is not found in equivalents.

In arriving at this conclusion I have been governed by that same sense of duty which on the occasions to which you refer made me your advocate, and which with me is a supreme power.

To this I am constrained by the spirit, if not by the letter of the Constitution, which forbids any person in my situation from accepting any present of any kind whatever from a foreign State.

With education for the people, and with peace, foreign and domestic, especially everywhere on the island, the independence of Hayti will be placed beyond the assaults of force or the intrigues of designing men, besides being an…

Following it always in your own conduct, and expecting others to follow it towards you, will you ever forget that sentiment of Humanity by which all men are one, with common title, with common right?