“The man who has no curiosity to know what the first statesman in America says on all these heads would go to bed without asking whether the fire in the next street was put out, or if the house next his own began to smoke. The very jobbers in Rebel bonds, or builders of the Shenandoah, might feel a desire to know which way the thing was going.”
The Scotsman, a foremost journal at Edinburgh, commenced a leader on this speech as follows:—
“It would be at least difficult to name a man in the United States, or rather the States now under process of being reunited, who is better entitled to a respectful hearing, all the world over, than Mr. Charles Sumner. He has had but one object,—a noble object, worthy any calculable amount of struggle and sacrifice; and he has pursued it ardently, bravely, disregarding both party and personal consequences, and letting no other object stand in the way or turn him aside for a moment from the straight path. He has sought only the Abolition of Slavery, and has deemed nothing else worth fighting for.”
The response by correspondence was prompt and earnest from various parts of the country. The letters from which extracts are taken, with the exception of that from Great Salt Lake City, were received immediately after the delivery of the speech.
Charles Stearns, ardently against Slavery, and familiar with the Rebel States, wrote from Springfield:—
“After an absence from good old Massachusetts of eleven years, my heart was made glad, the other day, by seeing a notice in the papers that you were to speak at the Republican Convention at Worcester. I immediately hastened thither, and felt happy beyond measure, as I listened to the deafening applause with which your appearance upon the platform was greeted.”
Rev. John T. Sargent, the Liberal clergyman, wrote from Boston:—
“That noble speech of yours at the Worcester Convention, so complete in its analysis of our national condition, dangers, and duties, ought to be printed in letters of gold, and emblazoned henceforth as the established moral code of every one of our States.”