ority, contrived to get the leadership more
and more into their own hands.

Of the Radicals Sumner was the spokesman most conspicuous in the public
eye. But not from him came either the driving force or the direction
which ultimately gave them the control of national policy.

Left to himself, Sumner could never have imposed the iron oppression
from which it took the South a life-and-death wrestle of ten years to
shake itself free. At the worst he would have been capable of imposing a
few paper pedantries, such as his foolish Civil Rights Bill, which would
have been torn up before their ink was dry. The will and intelligence
which dictated the Reconstruction belonged to a very different man, a
man entitled to a place not with puzzle-headed pedants or coat-turning
professionals but with the great tyrants of history.

Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania was in almost every respect the
opposite of his ally, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Sumner, empty of
most things, was especially empty of humour. Stevens had abundance of
humour of a somewhat fierce but very real kind. Some of his caustic
strokes are as good as anything recorded of Talleyrand: notably his
reply to an apologist of Johnson who urged in the President's defence
that he was "a selfmade man." "I am delighted to hear it," said Stevens
grimly; "it relieves the Creator of a terrible responsibility." With
this rather savage wit went courage which could face the most enormous
of tests; like Rabelais, like Danton, he could jest with death when
death was touching him on the shoulder. In public life he was not so
much careless of what he considered conventions as defiantly happy in
challenging them. It gave him keen delight to outrage at once the racial
sentiments of the South and the Puritanism of the North by compelling
the politicians whom he dominated and despised to pay public court to
his mulatto mistress.

The inspiring motive of this man was hatred of the South. It seems
probable that this sentiment had its origin in a genuine and honourable
detestation of Slavery.

As a practising lawyer in Pennsylvania he had at an earlier period taken
a prominent part in defending fugitive slaves. But by the time that he
stood forward as the chief opponent of the Presidential policy of
conciliation, Slavery had ceased to exist; yet his passion against the
former slave-owners seemed rather to increase than to diminish. I think
it certain, though I cannot produce here all t