eir hands upon the power to form and regulate their domestic
institutions in their own way, they held the power upon which free
institutions and slave institutions alike rested in the American States,
and that that power and its free exercise could never be taken from the
people by any Supreme Court or the dogma of any political party, and any
systematized attempt to take it away would be met by resistance that
would shiver the Union to fragments. The sovereignty of the people or
true democracy, like the elements of fire and water, is a gentle and a
genial thing, when the hand of representative government rests kindly
upon it, but if that hand dares to essay a wrong, then will the power of
the people become like the burning lava of the volcano, when its pent-up
fires escape, or the resistless waves of the ocean, when the storm moves
over its depths. The courts may guide and direct and check the popular
will, but when a great political idea, like that of the rightful
sovereignty of the States, either in the Union or in the territories,
has taken root and settled into a well-defined opinion in the popular
mind, the courts must let it alone; it is for them then to follow the
popular will, not to lead it. Law is the voice of the people. Let the
courts that assume to be the oracles of the law, see to it that they
mistake not the people's voice, especially on those great political
questions that touch the fountains of a nation's life.

The attempt of Mr. Buchanan's administration to force slavery upon
Kansas by means of the Lecompton Constitution, against the real
sentiment of the people, and against the true intent and meaning of the
organic law of Kansas, and failing in that, the attempt to override the
principle of popular sovereignty, by means of a false construction of
the Dred Scott decision, roused to renewed zeal and combined all the
Northern elements of opposition to slavery, and in the excitement of
angry passion that has followed, the great compromise of 1850, and the
true character of that measure, and its legitimate consequent, the
erasure of the Missouri compromise line, have been obscured in the
public mind, and both have lost their hold upon the calm judgments of
the people. Why is this? Are not the laws that now stand upon the
statute book of the nation, as the compromise measures of 1850, the same
as they were in 1852, when they were endorsed by nearly 3,000,000 of
votes--almost the unanimous vote of the nati