the public affairs of their region, so as best to secure their own supremacy.  No word of dissent to the institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction, even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in safety.  A Christian minister in Tennessee relates an act of fiendish cruelty inflicted upon a slave by one of the members of his church, and he is forced to leave his charge, if not to fly the country.  Another in South Carolina presumes to express in conversation his disapprobation of the murderous assault of Brooks on Senator Sumner, and his pastoral relations are broken up on the instant, as if he had been guilty of gross crime or flagrant heresy.  Professor Hedrick, in North Carolina, ventures to utter a preference for the Northern candidate in the last presidential campaign, and he is summarily ejected from his chair, and virtually banished from his native State.  Mr. Underwood, of Virginia, dares to attend the convention of the party he preferred, and he is forbidden to return to his home on pain of death.  The blackness of darkness and the stillness of death are thus forced to brood over that land which God formed so fair, and made to be so happy.

That such a tyranny should excite an antagonistic spirit of resistance is inevitable from the constitution of man and the character of God.  The sporadic cases of protest and of resistance to the slaveholding aristocracy, which lift themselves occasionally above the dead level of the surrounding despotism, are representative cases.  They stand for much more than their single selves.  They prove that there is a wide-spread spirit of discontent, informing great regions of the slave-land, which must one day find or force an opportunity of making itself heard and felt.  This we have just seen in the great movement in Missouri, the very nursing-mother of Border-Ruffianism itself, which narrowly missed making Emancipation the policy of the majority of the voters there.  Such a result is the product of no sudden culture.  It must have been long and slowly growing up.  And how could it be otherwise?  There must be intelligence enough among the non-slaveholding whites to see the difference there is between themselves and persons of the same condition in the Free States.  Why can they have no free schools?  Why is it necessary that a missionary society be formed at the North to furnish them with such ministers as the slave-master can approve?  Why can they not support their own ministers, and have a Gospel of Free Labor preached to them, if they choose?  Why are they hindered from taking such newspapers as they please?  Why are they subjected to a censorship of the press, which dictates to them what they may or may not read, and which punishes booksellers with exile and ruin for keeping for sale what they want to buy?  Why must Northern publishers expurgate and emasculate the literature of the world before it is permitted to reach them?  Why is it that the value of acres increases in a geometrical