denunciations of freebooters had only been fine words for the public ear; secretly he cherished a penchant for freebooters, or rather for the friends of freebooters; and, under those circumstances, to be presented, by his own agent, with the very chief of the freebooters, as a criminal and a scamp, was the most unheard-of simplicity of understanding, and the most astounding literalness of obedience, in any subordinate.  What to do was the question.  He had menaced Chatard with a cashiering for allowing Walker to escape; and here was Paulding, who did not allow him to escape,—­so he menaced Paulding likewise; and by way of capping the climax of absurdities, he set Walker himself at large, to go about the country clamoring to be sent back, at the expense of the government, to the scenes of his late innocent occupations and virtuous designs, whence he had been ruthlessly torn by an over-officious sailor.

The history of the farce is both argument and comment.  Walker was either a citizen of the United States, levying war upon a friendly foreign state, and as such amenable to the penalties of our neutrality laws,—­or he was a citizen of Nicaragua, as he pretended to be, abusing our protection to organize warlike enterprises against his fellow-citizens, and as such also amenable to our neutrality laws.  In either capacity, and however taken, he should have been severely dealt with by the President.  But, unfortunately, Mr. 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.  As the old barbarian Arbogastes used to say to the later Roman emperors, whom he helped to elevate, “The power which made you is the power which can break you,” so these modern masters of the throne dictate and guide its policy.  Mr. Buchanan was their man as much as Walker was, and, however grand his speeches before the public, he must do their bidding when things came to the trial.

But this allusion brings us, by an obvious transition, to the last and most important question submitted to the administration,—­the question of Kansas,—­in the management of which, we think, it will be found that all the before-noted deficiencies of the government have been combined with a criminal disregard of settled principles and almost universal convictions.  In reference to Kansas, as in reference to the other topics, the President began with fair and seductive promises.  He did not, it is true, either in his Message or anywhere else, that we know of, narrate the actual history of the long contest