“The Senator tells us that this is not, in his opinion, an assault upon the constitutional rights of a member of the Senate. He tells us that a member cannot be permitted to print and send abroad over the world, with impunity, his opinions,--but that he is liable to have them questioned in a judicial tribunal. Well, Sir, if this be so,--he is a lawyer, I am not,--I accept his view, and I ask, Why not have tested Mr. Sumner’s speech in a judicial tribunal, and let that tribunal have settled the question whether Mr. Sumner uttered a libel or not? Why was it necessary, why did the ‘chivalry’ of South Carolina require, that for words uttered on this floor, under the solemn guaranties of Constitutional Law, a Senator should be met here by violence? Why appeal from the floor of the Senate, from a judicial tribunal, to the bludgeon? I put the question to the Senator,--to the ‘chivalry’ of South Carolina,--ay, to ‘the gallant set’ (to use the Senator’s own words) of ‘Ninety-Six,’--Why was it necessary to substitute the bludgeon for the judicial tribunal? “Sir, the Senator from South Carolina--and in what I say to him to-day I have no disposition to say anything unkind or unjust, and if I utter any such word, I will withdraw it at once--told us, that, when my colleague came here, he came holding fanatical ideas, but that he met him, offered him his hand, and treated him with courtesy, supposing, as in other cases which had happened under his eye, that acquaintance with Southern gentlemen might cure him of his fanaticism. He gravely told us that his courtesy and attentions introduced Mr. Sumner where he could not otherwise have gone. The Senator will allow me to say that this is not the first time during this session we have heard this kind of talk about ‘social influence,’ and the necessity of association with gentlemen from the South, in order to have intercourse with the refined and cultivated society of Washington. Sir, Mr. Sumner was reared in a section of country where men know how to be gentlemen. He was trained in the society of gentlemen, in as good society as could be found in _that_ section of the country. He went abroad. In England and on the Continent he was received everywhere, as he had a right to be received, into the best social circles, into literary associations, and into that refined and polished society which adorns and graces the present age in Western Europe. I do not know where any gentleman could desire to go that Mr. Sumner could not go, without the assistance of the Senator from South Carolina, or any other person on this floor. Sir, we have heard quite enough of this. It is a piny-wood doctrine, a plantation idea. Gentlemen reared in refined and cultivated society are not accustomed to this language, and never indulge in its use towards others.