“Senator Sumner’s Kansas speech is the most masterly, striking, and scathing production of the session. The galleries were crowded with intellect, beauty, and fashion, and the anterooms were also thronged. His excoriation of Douglas was scornfully withering and scorching. He designated Senator Butler as the Don Quixote of Slavery, and Douglas as its Sancho Panza. Mr. Sumner never before made such an impression in force, manner, and emphatic style. He was animated and glowing throughout, hurling defiance among the opposition, and bravely denouncing the Kansas swindle from first to last. Some passages quite electrified the Chamber, and gave a new conception of the man. Finer effect has rarely been produced.” The scene was sketched by a correspondent of the _Missouri Democrat_, at St. Louis, as follows. “It may be rash to publish in Missouri a just estimate of the abilities of an Abolitionist. Sectional opinion demands caricatures, and not portraits. It views the leading men of the other section through the medium of its fear, its hatred, or its contempt, and can recognize no likeness, unless the features are distorted and the canvas is darkened, unless the countenance is wicked and the figure hideous. “Sumner had an audience calculated to arouse all his faculties, and to remind him that his position was in many respects similar to that of Burke, when he impeached Warren Hastings. His brother Senators were mostly in their seats,--by no means a common occurrence. The lobbies were crowded with the great outside politicians, of whom Senators and Members are frequently the instruments, who originate and guide political movements by means of the press. Francis P. Blair, and Thurlow Weed, and Robert J. Walker, and bevies of Southern delegates to the Cincinnati Convention were there; and the young orators of the House were also there,--Stephens, the keenest blade in the Proslavery ranks, looking as if his face was the battle-ground of boyhood and old age, and Keitt, measuring himself silently with Sumner, and doubtless thinking that the speech to which he was listening so attentively was like a Burmese idol, a monster covered with jewels. The ladies’ gallery was crowded to excess, and the fair ones overflowed into the anteroom of the Senate. The letter-writers in double file occupied their own gallery (for which their best thanks are due to John P. Hale), and passed upon the speech as it gradually came forth. The people in compact mass occupied the background.