f your legislative
proceedings outside of Kansas, their influence has nowhere been so happy
as within that Territory itself. Left to manage and control its own
affairs in its own way, without the pressure of external influence, the
revolutionary Topeka organization and all resistance to the Territorial
government established by Congress have been finally abandoned. As a
natural consequence that fine Territory now appears to be tranquil and
prosperous and is attracting increasing thousands of immigrants to make
it their happy home.

The past unfortunate experience of Kansas has enforced the lesson, so
often already taught, that resistance to lawful authority under our
form of government can not fail in the end to prove disastrous to its
authors. Had the people of the Territory yielded obedience to the laws
enacted by their legislature, it would at the present moment have
contained a large additional population of industrious and enterprising
citizens, who have been deterred from entering its borders by the
existence of civil strife and organized rebellion.

It was the resistance to rightful authority and the persevering attempts
to establish a revolutionary government under the Topeka constitution
which caused the people of Kansas to commit the grave error of refusing
to vote for delegates to the convention to frame a constitution under
a law not denied to be fair and just in its provisions. This refusal
to vote been the prolific source of all the evils which have followed.
In their hostility to the Territorial government they disregarded
the principle, absolutely essential to the working of our form of
government, that a majority of those who vote, not the majority who
may remain at home, from whatever cause, must decide the result of an
election. For this reason, seeking to take advantage of their own error,
they denied the authority of the convention thus elected to frame a
constitution.

The convention, notwithstanding, proceeded to adopt a constitution
unexceptionable in its general features, and providing for the
submission of the slavery question to a vote of the people, which, in my
opinion, they were bound to do under the Kansas and Nebraska act. This
was the all-important question which had alone convulsed the Territory;
and yet the opponents of the lawful government, persisting in their
first error, refrained from exercising their right to vote, and
preferred that slavery should continue rather than surrend