. Mammon is after him,
ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is
fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison-house; they have
searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after
another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they
have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can
never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key--the keys in the
hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred
different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what
invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to
make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is."

There is not room to quote the many other equally forcible points in Mr.
Lincoln's speech. Our narrative must proceed to other significant events
in the great pro-slavery reaction. Thus far the Kansas experiment had
produced nothing but agitation, strife, and bloodshed. First the storm
in Congress over repeal; then a mad rush of emigration to occupy the
Territory. This was followed by the Border Ruffian invasions, in which
Missouri voters elected a bogus territorial legislature, and the bogus
legislature enacted a code of bogus laws. In turn, the more rapid
emigration from free States filled the Territory with a majority of
free-State voters, who quickly organized a compact free-State party,
which sent a free-State constitution, known as the Topeka Constitution,
to Congress, and applied for admission. This movement proved barren,
because the two houses of Congress were divided in sentiment. Meanwhile,
President Pierce recognized the bogus laws, and issued proclamations
declaring the free-State movement illegal and insurrectionary; and the
free-State party had in its turn baffled the enforcement of the bogus
laws, partly by concerted action of nonconformity and neglect, partly by
open defiance. The whole finally culminated in a chronic border war
between Missouri raiders on one hand, and free-State guerrillas on the
other; and it became necessary to send Federal troops to check the
disorder. These were instructed by Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of
War, that "rebellion must be crushed." The future Confederate President
little suspected the tremendous prophetic import of his order. The most
significant illustration of the underlying spirit of the struggle was
that President Pierce had successively appointed three Democratic