hed
to destroy the Fugitive Slave Law and bring about the immediate and
unconditional emancipation of all slaves on the ground.

When two opposing gases come together, an explosion is inevitable. One
day in 1856, after the adjournment of the Senate, a Southern member of
Congress entered the Chamber, and finding Sumner seated, with his legs
under an iron desk screwed to the floor, and, therefore, helpless for
defense, with a heavy walking-stick the assailant beat the powerless man
into insensibility, two of his friends protecting him from those who
would interfere in his murderous assault. Having lost enough blood to
soak through the carpet and stain the very floor, unconscious, and
hovering between life and death, Sumner was carried to a sofa, thence to
his hotel. From that time on the scholar endured a living death. He was
carried to Paris, where Dr. Brown-Sequard tried "the fire cure" upon the
spine. But for years his desk was vacant. Massachusetts insisted that
the empty seat should proclaim to the world her abhorrence of the
barbarism that, unequal to intellectual debate, betakes itself to clubs
and murder. Later on Sumner did return to his seat, but he was broken in
health, and to the end was tortured with pain. Nevertheless, despite all
the physical distresses, he remained the Puritan in politics, adhering
inflexibly to his old ideals of liberty. The great lesson of Sumner's
life is the importance of fidelity to conviction and singleness of
purpose. All Sumner's speeches in Congress, all his lectures on the
platform, his appeals to the people of the North during the years when
he travelled incessantly, addressing great crowds all over the land, had
a single theme, "Liberty is national, Slavery is sectional; Liberty must
be established, Slavery must be destroyed." He had his faults and
limitations, but men without faults are generally men without force.
Limitations are like banks to a river; they increase the strength of the
current for a mill wheel. Sumner's concentration made his enemies call
him a narrow man and a fanatic. But Paul was narrow when he said, "This
one thing I do." Luther was narrow when he nailed his theses to the door
of the church in Wittenberg. Garrison was narrow and a fanatic when he
said, "I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I
will be heard." Rushing between the cliffs of its banks, the Rhine has
power through confinement; spreading out over the plains of North
Germa