“At such a moment as this, more than at any other, we feel the dignity, the awful responsibility, of the healing art. Let but that life be sacrificed, and left unavenged, and the wounds of that defenceless head, like the foul witch’s blow on her enchanted image, are repeated on the radiant forehead of Liberty herself, and flaw the golden circlet we had vainly written with the sacred name of Union!
“‘Dî, prohibete minas! Dî, talem avertite casum!’
“_The Surgeons of the City of Washington._--God grant them wisdom! for they are dressing the wounds of a mighty empire, and of uncounted generations.”
Hon. Josiah Quincy, in the eighty-fifth year of his age, addressed a letter to the Unitarian Festival, in which he said:--
“The hostile irruption of two members of Congress into the Senate Chamber of the United States, openly armed with deadly bludgeons, and probably secretly, according to the habits of their breed, with bowie-knives and revolvers, and there prostrating on the floor with their bludgeons a Senator of the United States, sitting peaceably in his seat, unconscious of danger, and from his position incapable of defence, inflicting upon him blows, until he sunk senseless under them, and which, if they do not prove mortal, it was not for want of malignant intent in the cowardly assassins,--and all this for words publicly spoken in the Senate, in the course of debate, allowed by its presiding officer to be spoken, _and exceeding not one hair’s breadth any line of truth or duty_: this is the fifth, and the climax, of this series of outrages, unparalleled, nefarious, and brutal.”
At an indignation meeting in the town of Quincy, this venerable citizen spoke as follows.
“The blow struck upon the head of Charles Sumner did not fall upon him alone. It was a blow purposely aimed at the North. It was a blow struck at the very Tree of Liberty. It speaks to us in words not to be mistaken. It says to us that Northern men shall not be heard in the halls of Congress, except at the peril of the bowie-knife, the bludgeon, and revolver. Nor is this any new thing.
“The bludgeon, heretofore only brandished, has at last been brought down; and now is the time for the North to fight. Charles Sumner needs not our sympathy: if he dies, his name will be immortal,--his name will be enrolled with the names of Warren, Sidney, and Russell; if he lives, he is destined to be the light of the nation.”