Among our own duties and responsibilities to the great and world-wide
cause of liberty,--discussed thus far in its relations to Europe,--Mr.
Sumner proceeds to present the grand duty we owe, not less to ourselves
than to Europe, of giving to the struggling nations an example of
government true to the memories of our National Anniversary, and to the
fundamental ideas of civil freedom "implied in an independent, but
rigidly responsible judiciary, and a complete separation of the
legislative and judicial functions."
From Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Marshall, and Story,--to say nothing
of English and French jurists,--Mr. Sumner brings authority to define
and illustrate the true place of the judicial office in the political
system of a free government. And here, fidelity to those principles of
liberty he had explained and defended, fidelity to the "good old cause"
itself, at home and in the grand forum of the nations, demanded and
received the frank avowal, that "a recent scene in the Supreme Court of
the United States has shown that Jefferson was no false prophet, and
has furnished at the same time a serious warning to all who prefer a
government based upon law to either despotism or anarchy."
The clear and sharp, merciless and logical veracity with which he
discriminates between the solemn judgment of a tribunal and a stump
speech from the bench,--the startling narration of decisions and
statutes, practice and precedent, condensed into a few of the closing
pages of the Oration, with which the discussion read by Chief Justice
Taney in the famous case of Dred Scott is confronted and exposed,--are
among the greater merits of this elaborate and able discourse.
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