that decision is made known," said he, "every one,
however high may be his position, however great his services, is bound
by the common courtesies which prevail in these political bodies to
yield at once. . . . I feel it my duty to make this explanation of the
vote I shall give. I think I am bound by the decision made after full
debate on this mere personal point, involving only the question whether
the honorable senator from Massachusetts shall occupy the chairmanship
of the Committee on Foreign Relations or the chairmanship of the
Committee on Privileges and Elections."

Other incidents connected with the removal tended to give it the air
of discourtesy to Mr. Sumner. One feature of it was especially marked
and painful. Mr. Sumner's acquaintance in Europe, certainly in
England, was larger than that of any other member of the Senate. His
speech on the _Alabama_ claims was the first utterance on the subject
which had arrested the attention of England, and now, as if in rebuke
of his patriotic position, the Queen's High Commissioners directly
after their arrival in Washington were called to witness a public
indignity to Mr. Sumner. The action of the Senate was, in effect,
notice to the whole world that Mr. Sumner was to have no further
connection with a great international question to which he had given
more attention than any other person connected with the Government.

Mr. Sumner declined the service to which he was assigned, and from that
time forward to the day of his death he had no rank as chairman, no
place upon a committee of the Senate, no committee-room for his use,
no clerk assigned to him for the needed discharge of his public duties.
When Mr. Sumner entered the Senate twenty years before, the pro-slavery
leaders who then controlled it had determined at one time in their
caucus to exclude him from all committee service on account of his
offensive opinions in regard to slavery, but upon sober second thought
they concluded that a persecution of that kind would add to Mr.
Sumner's strength rather than detract from it. He was therefore given
the ordinary assignment of a new member by the Southern men in control
and was thence regularly advanced until he became a member of the
Committee on Foreign Relations, under the chairmanship of James M.
Mason, with Douglas and Slidell as fellow-members.

For his fidelity to principle and his boldness in asserting the truth
at an earlier day Mr. Sumner was struck dow