“ Again and again the whirlwind of oratorical enthusiasm has roused and heaped up the threatening masses of the Free States, and again and again we have seen them collapse like a water-spout, into a crumbling heap of disintegrated bubbles, before the compact bullet of political audacity. While our legislatures have been resolving and re-resolving the principles of the Declaration of Independence, our adversaries have pushed their trenches, parallel after parallel, against the very citadel of our political equality. ”

“ It is a spectacle portentous of moral lapse and social disorganization, to see a statesman, who has had fifty years' experience of American politics, quibbling in defence of Executive violence against a free community, as if the conscience of the nation were no more august a tribunal than a police justice sitting upon a paltry case of assault. ”

“ Yet more portentous is it to see a great people consenting that fraud should be made national by the voice of a Congress in which the casting vote may be bought by a tide-waitership, and then invested with the solemnity of law by a Court whose members are selected, not for uprightness of character or breadth of mind, but by the inverse test of their capacity for cringing in subservience to party, and for narrowing a judgment already slender as the line of personal interest, till it becomes so threadlike as to bend at the touch, nay, at the breath, of sectional rapacity. ”

“ A scruple of conscience has no right to outweigh a pound of duty, though it ought to make a ton of private interest kick the beam. The great aim of the Republican party should be to gain one victory for the Free States. One victory will make us a unit, and is equal to a reinforcement of fifty thousand men. The genius of success in politics or war is to know Opportunity at first sight. There is no mistress so easily tired as Fortune. We must waste no more time in investigating the motives of our recruits. ”

“ Our sense of private honor and integrity must be quickened; our consciousness of responsibility to God and man for the success of this experiment in practical Democracy, in order to which the destiny of a hemisphere has been entrusted to us, must be roused and exalted; we must learn to feel that the safety of universal suffrage lies in the sensitiveness of the individual voter to every abuse of delegated authority, every treachery to representative duty, as a stain upon his own personal integrity ”

“ Buchanan ought to have read the warning which was thus blazed across the political skies, like the hand-writing upon the wall. He ought to have discerned in this general movement the signs of a deep, earnest, and irrepressible conviction on the part of the North. It is no slight cause which can start such general and enthusiastic expressions of popular feeling; they cannot be manufactured; they are not the work of mere party excitement; there is nothing spurious and nothing hollow in them ”

“ While we insist that Morals should govern the _motives_ of political action, and that no party can be permanently strong which has not the reserve of a great principle behind it, we affirm with no less strength of conviction that the details of our National Housekeeping should be managed by practical sense and worldly forethought. The policy of states moves along the beaten highways of experience, and, where terrestrial guide-posts are plenty, we need not ask our way of the stars. ”

“ We cannot believe that this unhistoried continent,--this virgin leaf in the great diary of man's conquest over the planet, on which our fathers wrote two words of epic grandeur,--Plymouth and Bunker Hill,--is to bear for its colophon the record of men who inherited greatness and left it pusillanimity,--a republic, and made it anarchy,--freedom, and were content as serfs,--of men who, born to the noblest estate of grand ideas and fair expectancies the world had ever seen, bequeathed the sordid price of them in gold. ”

“ The capacity of the English race for self-government is measured by their regard as well for the forms as the essence of law. A race conservative beyond all others of what is established, averse beyond all others to the heroic remedy of forcible revolution, they have yet three times in the space of a century and a half assumed the chances of rebellion and the certain perils of civil war, rather than submit to have Right infringed by Prerogative, and the scales of Justice made a cheat by false weights that kept the shape but lacked the substance of legitimate precedent. ”

“ We have seen Freedom pronounced sectional and Slavery national by the highest tribunal of the republic. We have seen the legislatures of Southern States passing acts for the renewal and encouragement of the slave-trade. We have seen the attempted assassination of a senator in his seat justified and applauded by public meetings and the resolutions of State Assemblies. ”

“ A siege, if uninterrupted, is a mere matter of time, and must end in capitulation. Our only safety is in assuming the offensive. Are we to be terrified any longer by such Chinese devices of warfare as the cry of Disunion,--a threat as hollow as the mask from which it issues, as harmless as the periodical suicides of Mantalini, as insincere as the spoiled child's refusal of his supper? We have no desire for a dissolution of our confederacy, though it is not for us to fear it. ”

“ But so rapid has been the downward course of our national politics under the guidance of our oligarchical Democracy, that the question on which we take issue, whatever it may once have been, is no longer a sectional one, and concerns not the slavery of the negro, but that of the Northern white man. Whatever doubt there may be about the physical degeneration of the race, it is more than certain that the people of the Northern States have no longer the moral stature of their illustrious ancestry ”

“ The Organic Act is the supreme law of the Territory, which can be altered or revoked only by the authority from which it emanated; and every measure commenced or prosecuted with a design to annul that law, to subvert the Territorial government, or to put in force in its place a new government, without the consent of Congress, is a flagrant usurpation. ”

“ No man was allowed to "disapprove" it, no man was allowed to "reject" it,--except in regard to a single section,--and before he could vote for or against that, he was obliged to vote in favor of all the rest. If there had been a hundred thousand voters in the Territory opposed to the Constitution, and but one voter in its favor, the hundred thousand voters could not have voted upon it at all, but the one voter could,--and the vote of that one would have been construed into a popular approval, while the will of all the others would have been practically void. ”

“ No sentiment more livingly pervades our national mind, no sentiment is juster in itself, than that they who are to live under the laws ought to decide on the character of the laws,--that they whose persons, property, welfare, happiness, life, are to be controlled by a Constitution of Government, ought to participate in the formation of that government. ”

“ It is the highest function of political sovereignty to devise and ordain the organic law of society, the vital form of its being; and the characteristic difference between the despotic or oligarchical and the republican government is, that in the one case the function is exercised by a monarch or a class, and in the other by the body of the citizens. ”

“ It cannot be too often repeated, that the only responsibility which is of saving efficacy in a Democracy is that of every individual man in it to his conscience and his God. As long as any one of us holds the ballot in his hand, he is truly, what we sometimes vaguely boast, a sovereign,--a constituent part of Destiny ”

“ But there is no danger; the law that binds our system of confederate stars together is of stronger fibre than to be snapped by the trembling finger of Toombs or cut by the bloodless sword of Davis; the march of the Universe is not to be stayed because some gentleman in Buncombe declares that his sweet-potato-patch shall not go along with it. But we have no apprehension. The sweet attraction which knits the sons of Virginia to the Treasury has lost none of its controlling force. ”

“ Unquestionably superior in numbers, and claiming an equal preeminence in wealth, intelligence, and civilization, we have steadily lost in political power and in the consideration which springs from it. Is the preponderance of the South due to any natural superiority of an Aristocracy over a Democracy? ”

“ The North has too generally allowed its strength to be divided by personal preferences and by-questions, till it has almost seemed as if a moral principle had less constringent force to hold its followers together than the gravitation of private interest, the Newtonian law of that system whereof the dollar is the central sun, which has hitherto made the owners of slaves unitary, and given them the power which springs from concentration and the success which is sure to follow concert of action. ”

“ Buchanan, not left to his own instincts of right, is surrounded by assistants who have other than great public motives for their conduct. Walker's schemes were not individual schemes, were not simple projects of piracy and plunder, got up on his own responsibility and for his own ends. Connected with important collateral issues, they received the sympathy and support of others more potent than himself. He was, in a word, the instrument of the propagandist slave-holders, the fear of whom is ever before a President's eyes. ”

“ Do our leading politicians, and the prominent bankers and merchants who sustain them, know what a dangerous lesson they are setting to a people whose affairs are controlled by universal suffrage, when they affirm that to be right which can by any false pretence be voted so? ”

“ The wind that moans among the columns of the Parthenon, or rustles through the weeds on the palaces of the Caesars, whimpers no truer prophecies than that venal breath which, at a signal from the patron in the White House, bends all one way the obsequious leaves of a partisan press, ominous of popular decadence. ”

“ A convention so composed ought to have been ashamed of the very pretence of acting in the name of the whole people. It would have been ashamed of it, if it had contained men sincerely anxious to reflect the will of the great body of the citizens. ”

“ But all the Democratic Governors of the Territory--with the single exception of Shannon, and the recently appointed acting Governor, Denver, who is prudently silent--testify urgently to the same truth. Reeder, Geary, and Walker, together with the late acting Governor, Stanton, asseverate, in the most earnest and emphatic manner, that the majority in Kansas is for making it a Free State,--that the minority which has ruled is a factious minority, and that they have obtained and perpetuated their ascendency by a most unblushing series of crimes and frauds. ”

“ Conscience is a good tutor to tell a man on which side to act, but she leaves the question of _How to act_ to every man's prudence and judgment. An over-nice conscience has before now turned the stomach of a great cause on the eve of action. ”

“ The change is sad 'twixt Now and Then: the Great Republic is without influence in the councils of the world; to be an American, in Europe, is to be the accomplice of filibusters and slave-traders; instead of men and thought, as was hoped of us, we send to the Old World cotton, corn, and tobacco, and are but as one of her outlying farms. ”

“ We are to establish no aristocracy of race or complexion, no caste which Nature and Revelation alike refuse to recognize, but the indefeasible right of man to the soil which he subdues, and the muscles with which he subdues it. If this be a sectional creed, it is a sectionality which at least includes three hundred and fifty-nine degrees of the circle of man's political aspiration and physical activity, and we may well be easy under the imputation. ”