Man, as an individual, is capable of indefinite improvement.
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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Writers in our own age, of much ability and unexampled hardihood, while adopting this fundamental law, proceed to arraign existing institutions of society.
It entered into his aspiration to deliver man from present weakness by extending his power over Nature.
In reason, knowledge, and virtue he did not hesitate to place his own age before preceding ages.
Perceiving clearly the advance already made, he drew from it the assurance of yet further advance.
It remained that it should be announced, not only as a special law applicable to certain departments, but as a general Law of Humanity, universal in application, guiding men in all their labors, and erecting before them a goal of…
The age enlightened by the genius of Pascal was ready to discuss the question then at hand, on the comparative merits of Ancients and Moderns, involving an inquiry into the principles of Progress, particularly in art and literature.
From this we see with what injustice we respect Antiquity in its philosophers; for, since old age is the period most distant from infancy, who does not see that the old age of this universal man must not be sought in the times nearest his…
So that the whole succession of men in the course of so many ages may be regarded as one man who lives always and who learns continually.
The Law of Progress received from him its earliest and most distinct statement as a rule of philosophy applicable to all the sciences depending upon experience and reason.
From Descartes I come to Pascal, never to be mentioned without a tribute to the early genius which, though removed from life at the age of thirty-nine, left an ineffaceable trace upon the religion, science, and literature of his time.
In France we trace this law through a succession of master minds,--first of whom in time, as in authority, is Descartes, the chief of French philosophy.
His soul was touched by sympathy for all mankind, and he saw its sure advance.
And yet, recognizing this law, the gates of the Future were open to him, and he saw Man in distant perspective, arrived at heights of happiness which he cannot now conceive.
Leibnitz saw the Law of Progress by intuition, and became its herald.
It is by a sure series that we advance, using and enjoying all our gifts for health of body and improvement of mind.
The Present, born of the Past, he said, is pregnant with the Future.
Believing monarchy a perfect government, he did not see beyond the time of kings.
Ingenuity and novelty are stamped upon this exposition, which is elevated by the exclusion of chance and the recognition of God.
Three stages marked the history of mankind: first, the divine, or theocratic; next, the heroic; and, lastly, the human.
To all ignorant of this tendency, history, instead of a connected chain, with cause and effect in natural order, is nothing but a disconnected, irregular series of incidents, like separate and confused circles having no common bond.
They did not perceive that the kingdom of the Lord was to come, and the Law to be fulfilled by a continuity of daily labor.
Long before Philosophy deduced the Law of Human Progress from the history of man, the Gospel silently planted it in the human heart.
Though imperfectly understood, or recognized, in the night of ignorance and prejudice, they were heralds of the dawn.
There is nothing of good so vast or beautiful, nothing so distant or seemingly inaccessible, as to fall beyond the reach of these promises.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
