that better and quite different influence, the tone of
opinion prevailing in the pleasantest society, inclined always to the
Southern view of every question, and these influences were nowhere more
felt than among Washington politicians. A strong and respectable group
of Southern Senators, of whom Jefferson Davis was the strongest, were
the real driving power of the administration. Convivial President
Pierce and doting President Buchanan after him were complaisant to
their least scrupulous suggestions in a degree hardly credible of
honourable men who were not themselves Southerners.

One famous incident of life in Congress must be told to explain the
temper of the times. In 1856, during one of the many debates that
arose out of Kansas, Sumner recited in the Senate a speech
conscientiously calculated to sting the slave-owning Senators to
madness. Sumner was a man with brains and with courage and rectitude
beyond praise, set off by a powerful and noble frame, but he lacked
every minor quality of greatness. He would not call his opponent in
debate a skunk, but he would expend great verbal ingenuity in coupling
his name with repeated references to that animal's attributes. On this
occasion he used to the full both the finer and the most exquisitely
tasteless qualities of his eloquence. This sort of thing passed the
censorship of many excellent Northern men who would lament Lincoln's
lack of refinement; and though from first to last the serious
provocation in their disputes lay in the set policy of the Southern
leaders, it ought to be realised that they, men who for the most part
were quite kind to their slaves and had long ago argued themselves out
of any compunction about slavery, were often exposed to intense verbal
provocation. Nevertheless, what followed on Sumner's speech is
terribly significant of the depravation of Southern honour.

Congressman Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, had an uncle in the
Senate; South Carolina, and this Senator in particular, had been
specially favoured with self-righteous insolence in Sumner's speech. A
day or so later the Senate had just risen and Sumner sat writing at his
desk in the Senate chamber in a position in which he could not quickly
rise. Brooks walked in, burning with piety towards his State and his
uncle, and in the presence, it seems, of Southern Senators who could
have stopped him, beat Sumner on the head with a stick with all his
might. Sumner was incapacitated