grandly echoed on the floor of Congress during the past winter. We can
not add one line or precept to the comprehensive speech recently made by
Charles Sumner in the Senate, to prove that "no just government can be
formed without the consent of the governed;" to prove the dignity, the
education, the power, the necessity, the salvation of the ballot in the
hand of every man and woman; to prove that a just government and a true
church rest alike on the sacred rights of the individual.

As you are familiar with Sumner's speech on "Equal Rights to All," so
convincing in facts, so clear in philosophy, and so elaborate in
quotations from the great minds of the past, without reproducing the
chain of argument, permit us to call your attention to a few of its
unanswerable assertions regarding the ballot:

I plead now for the ballot, as the great guarantee, and the only
sufficient guarantee--being in itself peacemaker, reconciler,
schoolmaster and protector--to which we are bound by every
necessity and every reason; and I speak also for the good of the
States lately in rebellion, as well as for the glory and safety of
the republic, that it may be an example to mankind.

Ay, sir, the ballot is the Columbiad of our political life, and
every citizen who has it is a full-armed Monitor.

The ballot is schoolmaster. Reading and writing are of inestimable
value, but the ballot teaches what these can not teach.

Plutarch records that the wise man of Athens charmed the people by
saying that equality causes no war, and "both the rich and the poor
repeated it."

The ballot is like charity, which never faileth, and without which
man is only as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The ballot is
the one thing needful, without which rights of testimony and all
other rights will be no better than cobwebs which the master will
break through with impunity. To him who has the ballot all other
things shall be given--protection, opportunity, education, a
homestead. The ballot is like the horn of abundance, out of which
overflow rights of every kind, with corn, cotton, rice and all the
fruits of the earth. Or, better still, it is like the hand of the
body, without which man, who is now only a little lower than the
angels, must have continued only a little above the brutes. They
are fearfully and wonderfully made; but as i