wished to prove that it was indissolubly wedded
to injustice, inconsistency, and error, it could not have chosen a
better method of doing so than it has actually pursued, in the entire
management of the Kansas question. From the beginning to the end, that
has been both a blunder and a crime. Nothing more atrocious,--nothing
more perverse,--nothing more foolish, as a matter of policy,--and
we might add, but for the seriousness of the subject, nothing more
ludicrous,--has occurred in our history, than the attempt, which has now
been persisted in for several years, to force the evils of Slavery upon
a people who cannot and will not endure them.

We say, to force the evils of slavery upon an unwilling people,--because
such has been and is the only end of this protracted endeavor. The
authors of the scheme have scarcely shown the ordinary cunning of
rogues, which conceals its ulterior purposes. Disdaining the advice
of Mrs. Peachum to her daughter Polly, to be "somewhat nice" in her
deviations from virtue, they have advanced bravely and flagrantly to
their nefarious object. They have been reckless, defiant, aggressive;
but, unfortunately for them, they have not been sagacious. The thin
disguise of principle under which they masked their designs at the
outset--as it were a bit of oiled paper--was soon torn away; the plot
betrayed its inherent wickedness from step to step; the instruments
selected to execute it have one after another abandoned the task,
as quite impracticable for any honest mortal; and now these whilom
advocates of "Popular Sovereignty" stand exposed to the scorn and
derision of the country, as nothing less than what their opponents all
along declared them to be,--the sworn champions of Slavery-Extension.
All the movements and changes of their external policy find their
explication in the single phrase, the actual and the political
advancement of the interests of Slavery.

It is humiliating to an American citizen to cast his eyes back, even for
a moment, to the history of this Kansas plot,--humiliating in many ways;
but in none more so than in the revelation it makes of the depth
and extent of party-servility in the Northern mind. Throughout the
proceedings of the "Democracy" towards the unhappy settlers of Kansas,
it is difficult to place the finger on a single act of large, just, or
generous policy; every step in it appears to have developed some new
outrage or some new fraud; and yet, every step in it has