to submit to the most outrageous abuses.  Their towns were burned, their presses destroyed, their assemblies dispersed, and their wives and children brutally insulted.  The debauched and imbecile Governor, who represented the Federal Power, hounded on the miscreants of the border to the work of destruction, so long as he was able; but he happily became in the end too weak even for this perfunctory labor; and he gradually sank into deliquium, till his final withdrawal into the obscurities whence he had emerged gave a momentary peace to the distracted and baffled settlers.

We pass over the administration of Geary, the third of the Kansas Governors,—­a period in which the ravages of the marauders were continued, but under meliorated circumstances.  The great uprising of the Northern masses, in the Presidential election, had impressed upon the most desperate of the Pro-Slavery faction the necessity of a restrained and moderated zeal.  Geary went to the Territory with some desire to deal justly with all parties.  He fancied, from the promises made to him, that he would be sustained in this honorable course by the President.  It was no part of his conception of his task, that he should be called upon to screen assassins, to justify perjury.  But he had reckoned without knowledge of what he had undertaken.  He was soon involved with the self-styled judiciary of Kansas, whose especial favorites were the promoters of outrage; his correspondence was intercepted, his plans thwarted, his motives aspersed, his life menaced; and he resigned his thankless charge, in a feeling of profound contempt and bitter disappointment,—­of contempt for the restless knot of villains who circumvented all conciliatory action, and of disappointment towards superiors at Washington who betrayed their promises of countenance and support.

With the advent of Mr. Buchanan to the Presidency a new era was expected, because a new era had been plainly prescribed by the entire course and spirit of the Presidential campaign.  All through that heated and violent contest, it was loudly promised on one side, as it was loudly demanded on the other, that the affairs of Kansas should be honestly and equitably administered.  As the time had then come, in the progress of population, when the Territory might be considered competent to determine its political institutions,—­the period of its immaturity and pupilage being past,—­the election turned upon the single issue of Justice to Kansas.  Mr. Buchanan and his party,—­their conventions, their orators, and their newspapers,—­in order to quell the storm of indignation swelling the Northern heart, were voluble in their pledges of a fair field for a fair settlement of all its difficulties.  In the name of Popular Sovereignty,—­or of the indisputable right of every people, that is a people, to determine its political constitution for itself,—­they achieved a hard-won success.  On no other ground could they have met the gallant charge of their opponents, and on no other ground