C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

---

‘ [360] votes enough to send me here, if the people had supposed I should try to use my power to upset Slavery. Why, the first thing you'd see, would be a mutiny in the army. No! We must wait until every other means has been exhausted. This thunderbolt will keep.’

I replied by telling a story, as I didn't consider that the President of the United States could claim any special monopoly in that line—

‘That reminds me, Mr. Lincoln, of a neighbor of ours in Connecticut, to whom, one fall, we gave some apples, with directions how to preserve them. They were to be laid down in a barrel of dry sand, headed up, and not opened till the 4th of July, the next year. On that morning he paid us a visit, and announced that he had opened his apples. “Well, did they keep?” “Yes,” said he, “they kept: but they were all rotten!” ’

Mr. Lincoln, who was kind enough to laugh at other people's jokes as heartily as he expected everybody to laugh at his own, took it in good part, and replied:

‘The powder in this bombshell will keep dry: and when the fuse is lit, I intend to have them touch it off themselves.’

While Mr. Sumner was disposed to render all the aid he could to Mr. Lincoln, he everywhere advocated a widely different policy,—the one which he first announced at Worcester,—repeated and reiterated in speeches in the Senate,—in his daily conversation, and in his broad correspondence with enlightened men all over Christendom. In England, France, and Germany, his views were widely made known, under the advocacy of the foremost of the Liberals, and their organs in England; by such men as Count Gasparin, and Edouard Laboulaye, of Paris; by Joshua R. Giddings, our Consul-General