really hearing correctly.

This resolution denounced the charge that they were Radicals at all. It
denounced the attempt of any man to interfere by violence with slaves or
Slavery where protected by the supreme law of the land. It repudiated
as stale and ridiculous the charge of Abolitionism against them. And
declared that such an accusation is without a shadow of truth to support
it.

Charles Stearns, the representative of the New England Society, leaped
to his feet and denounced the platform in withering tones. He fairly
shrieked his final sentence:

"All honest anti-slavery men, here and elsewhere, will spit on your
platform!"

He paused and faced the leaders who had drafted it.

"And all pro-slavery men must forever despise the base sycophants who
originated it!"

John Brown, Jr., applauded. The crowd laughed.

Old John Brown had paid no further heed to the proceedings of the
Convention. His eyelids were drawn half down. Only pin points of
glittering light remained.

The resolutions were adopted by an overwhelming majority.

In the East, Horace Greeley in the _Tribune_ reluctantly accepted
the platform: "Why free blacks should be excluded it is difficult to
understand; but if Slavery can be kept out by compromise of that sort,
we shall not complain. An error of this character may be corrected; but
let Slavery obtain a foothold there and it is not so easily removed."

Brown's hopes were to be still further dashed by the persistence
with which the leaders of this Convention followed up the program of
establishing a white man's country on the free plains of the West.

When the Convention met at Topeka on the twenty-third of October, to
form a Constitution, the determination to exclude all negroes from
Kansas was again sustained. The majority were finally badgered into
submitting the issue to a separate vote of the people. On the fifteenth
of December, the Northern settlers voted on it and the question _was_
settled.

Negroes were excluded by a three-fourths majority.

Three-fourths of the Free State settlers were in favor of a white man's
country and the heaviest vote against the admission of negroes was
polled in Lawrence and Topeka, where the Radicals had from the first
made the most noise.

The Northern men who had come to Kansas merely to oppose the extension
of Slavery were in a hopeless minority in their own party. The American
voters still had too much common sense to be led into a position to