By a power of assimilation, in no nation so strongly marked, she has absorbed the various races and sovereignties once filling her territory with violence and conflict, and has converted them all to herself.
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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Territories, once possessing an equivocal and turbulent independence, feel new power and happiness in peaceful association.
The great nations of our day have grown and matured into their present form by the gradual absorption of these political bodies.
History bears ample testimony to the potency of this attraction.
It is in the order of Providence, that individuals, families, tribes, and nations should tend, by means of association, to a final Unity.
There is, first, the Swiss Republic, or Helvetic Union, which, beginning so long ago as 1308, has preserved Peace among its members during the greater part of five centuries.
Voluntary associations, confederacies, leagues, coalitions, and congresses of nations, though fugitive and limited in influence, all attest the unsatisfied desires of men solicitous for union, while they foreshadow the means by which it…
And just in proportion as these find recognition from individuals and from nations will War be impossible.
Here is the vital elixir of nations, the true philosopher's stone of divine efficacy to enrich the civilization of mankind.
The common good and mutual consent are its enduring base, Justice and Love its animating soul.
Not in benevolence, but in selfishness, has Unity been sought in times past,--not to promote the happiness of all, but to establish the dominion of one.
In this spirit, and with this encouragement, we must labor for that grand and final object, watchword of all ages, the Unity of the Human Family.
By your own energies, through united fraternal endeavor, will the tyranny of War be overthrown, and its Juggernaut in turn be crushed to earth.
Like the slave under a weary weight of chains, it raises its exhausted arms, and pleads for the angel Deliverer.
Civilization now writhes in travail and torment, and asks for liberation from oppressive sway.
Here I shall unfold the tendencies and examples of nations, and the sacred efforts of individuals, constituting the Peace Movement, now ready to triumph,--with practical suggestions on our duties to this cause, and a concluding glance at…
It stands before us, a colossal image of International Justice, with the sword, but without the scales,--like a hideous Mexican idol, besmeared with human blood, and surrounded by the sickening stench of human sacrifice.
Fortifications are instruments, and standing armies are hired champions, in the great Duel of Nations.
Condemning the War System as barbarous and most wasteful, the token and relic of a society alien to Christian civilization, we except the Navy, so far as necessary in arrest of pirates, of traffickers in human flesh, and generally in…
The proper rule is, In time of Peace cultivate the arts of Peace.
Whatever may be the infirmities of our passions, it is plain that the natural state of man, assuring the highest happiness, and to which he tends by an irresistible heavenly attraction, is Peace.
Such men will possess a Christian greatness, rendering them unable to do an injury; while their character, instinct with all the guardian virtues, must render their neighbors unable to do an injury to them.
Overflowing with intelligence, with charity, with civilization, with all that constitutes a generous state, ours would be peaceful triumphs, transcending all yet achieved, and surrounding the land with an invincible self-defensive might…
Had such means been devoted to railroads and canals, schools and colleges, the country would possess, at the present moment, an accumulated material power grander far than any it now boasts.
Consider the prodigious sums, exceeding in all two thousand millions of dollars, squandered by the United States, since the adoption of the National Constitution, for the sake of the War System.
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