Why the injunction to multiply and subdue the earth, if there are to be Sudras and Pariahs always?
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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Why this common humanity, why this common brotherhood, if the inheritance is for Brahmins only?
Believing in God, I believe also in Man, through whose God-given energies all this will be accomplished.
Assuming this common humanity, it is difficult to see how reason can resist the conclusion, that in the lapse of time there must be a common, universal civilization, which every nation and every people will share.
Here, once more, is that universal law which forbids Caste, speaking not only with the voice of Science, but of Religion also,--praying, pleading, protesting, in the name of a Common Father, against such wrong and insult to our brother man.
If not all children of Adam, we are all children of God,--if not all from the same father on earth, we are all from the same Father in Heaven; and this affecting relationship, which knows no distinction of race or color, is more vital and…
God is Universal Father; then are we all brothers.
Religion takes up the lesson, and the daily prayer, “Our Father who art in Heaven,” is the daily witness to the Brotherhood of Man.
Every human being carries a universe in himself; but here, as in that other universe, is the same prevailing law of Unity, in harmony with which the starry heavens move in their spheres and men are constrained to the duties of life.
Only when we consider the universality of the Moral Law can we fully appreciate the grandeur of this Unity.
Not one law for one group of stars, and one law for one group of men,--but one law for all stars, and one law for all men.
Laplace, from the heights of his knowledge, teaches that the curve described by a simple particle of air or vapor is regulated by a law as certain as the orbits of the planets; and is not Man the equal subject of certain law?
We are told that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” If this be ever true, it cannot be better illustrated than by that sciolism which from the varieties of the human species would overthrow that sublime Unity which is the first law…
It is enough that the master is Man; and thus, even through the instincts of a brute, does Nature testify to that Unity of the Human Family by virtue of which all are alike in rights.
It is to Man that the dog is faithful; nor does it matter of what condition, whether the child of wealth or the rough shepherd tending his flocks; nor does it matter of what complexion, whether Caucasian white, or Ethiopian black, or…
By these tokens is Man known everywhere to be Man, and by these tokens is he everywhere entitled to the Rights of Man.
God has given to all the same longevity, marking a common mortality,--the same cosmopolitan character, marking citizenship everywhere,--and the same capacity for improvement, marking that tendency sometimes called the perfectibility of the…
Look at Man in his destiny here or hereafter, so far as it can be penetrated by mortal vision, and who will venture to claim for any variety or class exclusive prerogatives on earth or in heaven?
Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?--fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a…
The variance, whether of complexion, configuration, or language, is external and superficial only, like the dress we wear.
In all essentials constituting Humanity, in all that makes Man, all varieties of the human species are one and the same.
Whatever the judgment on the unity of origin, where, from the nature of the case, there can be no final human testimony, it is a source of infinite consolation that we can anchor to that other unity found in a common organization, a common…
Through him Science is enlisted for the Equal Rights of All.
And what he said is much in little,--most simple, but most comprehensive; for, while asserting the Unity of the Human Family, he repels that disheartening pretension of Caste which I insist shall find no place in our political system.
Whilst we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men.
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