The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-05-24
SMITH AND SUMNER.

The collision of skulls which has Just taken
place between Senator Sumner and Mr.. Goodwin
Smith will hardly knock much practical wisdom
into either head But it may possibly startle
some well-intentiOned people who have hereto
fore suffered their five wits to be muddled by
the many words of these men and men like
these, into rejecting on the monstrous absurdity
and peril of mistaking demagogues for states
men and dogmatists for philosophers
The nonsense which Senator Sumner has been
talking about the moral responsibility of Eng
land to America, and the equal nonsense which
Mr. Smith has been writing about the influence
of Mr.. Summers talk upon the passions and the
purposes of the American people, it is easy
enough Tor any man OF average intelligence to
recognize as nonsense. There probably are not
ten educated men of mature years outside of
lunatic asylum or of the State of Massachusetts,
who have for single moment seriously enter
taincd the notion of enforcing upon Great
Britain, either by argument or by arms, claim for
damages due this country to the extent of half
the cost of the civil war as the only Just eXpia-
tiOn of the crime committed by Great Britain i'm
treating the Southern States as "belgerentsn
And there certainly are no more, if so many, such
men who can see in Mr.. GOldwin Smiths feverish
warning to all British residents of America to
pack their trunks and be ready to flee, anything
but the preposterous terror of an unbalanced
mind in dyspeptic body. Yet for years on
years past these two personages have been com
mandmg influence and authority, both in Eng
land and in America, by utteranccs not one
whit more sane more measured ormOre tenabe
under fire than these. What Mr.. Sumner ap-
pears in his speech on the Alabama claims, that
he has appeared in all his speeches on important
public questions. His temperament is essen
TALLY rabid; his methods are essentially rhe
torical. His harangues on the wrongs of 'bleed-
ing Kansas his denunciatiOns of South
em secession, his attacks on North
ern Copperheadism - have all been of a
| piece with his latest diatribe about Eng
! land and Englands moral obligation
to make herself party on the side
the Union in our late civil war. It is not Mr..
! Sumner who has changed at all. 1t is simply
| the atmosphere which has cooled around HIM.
! This the English public do not know; and so it
| is that his Alabama speech passes with them,
like his speeches during the war, the voice of
! a whole people crazed with a passion like his
own. This the American public do not know;
and so il is that the excitement of the English
| public over his Alabama speech seems to an
insane exhibition of moral gymnastics, like the
! convOlutiOns of a ballroom watched by an OBJ
server too far distant to hear the strains of the
| music which sets all those whirlng groups
in motion. As with Mr.. Sumner so with Mr..
Goodwin Smith. Mr.. GOldwin Smiths appeals
in behalf of the Northern cause made to the
English people during our civil war, were
precisely as hot and hasty as illogical and as
Incorporate, as his recent letter to the London
BeetiCe protesting against any further emigra-
tiOn of British subjects to America. But be-
| cause his heat and his haste, his contempt of
logic and his etferveseent temper, then made
| him echo our own wishes and our own hopes
/ our own passions fears, hates, and preferences,
we chose to accept him as a great and wise
teacher of men. 1t is one of the calamities of
such a state of things as that from which we
! are now slowly emerging that it upsets and con-
! tounds both the Intellectual and moral standards
! of the general mind. Any man is wise and
clear-headed, to people crazed with war, who
! approves their policy and urges on their wrath.
| Any man is just and noble who joins with
them in their fierce work. 1t never occurs to
! them to reflect that the worst and weakest of
men are precisely the men who are most likely
TO drift with the overwhelming tides of great
! popular emotion, and to snatch from the easy
| confidence of an excited nation the prizes which
in calmer times it would be impossible for them
! to acquire. Have we not seen II Sickles and a
| Butler accounted little less than apostles and
martyrs for putting out hands stained with all
imaginable corruptions to accept from the re-
public its highest honors, both civil and Mill
tary? score of years hence, such moral mon
strosities as this may be as comical probably as
the Intellectual perversion of II Smith and q
Sumner into national guides and political philos.
ophers. But we are still within the penumbra
of the gross delusion, and it is matter as ye
rather for sadness and for shame than for satire
| and for mirth