But there was a still graver aspect that this question was beginning to assume:  A woman that is a slave has neither the motive nor the power to protect her own virtue; and the land was threatened to be filled with a nation of mulattoes.  But this mixed race would possess all the pride, ambition and talent of the superior race; at the same time they would feel all that undying hatred that a subject people feel toward the men by whom they are subjugated.  We would then be sleeping on a volcano, such as may at any hour engulf the empire of Russia.

All this I pondered in my heart as I slowly made my way toward St. Joseph, on the Missouri River, which flows along the western border of Kansas.  And now this question was coming to the front and forcing a settlement, and in Kansas would be the first real conflict.  In Congress they had only paltried with, it; now the people were to try their hand.  And what should I do?  Had I any right as a Christian and as an American citizen, when providentially called to this work, to withdraw myself from aiding in its settlement?  And should I turn my horse in the opposite direction, go back to my Bro.  Graves at Chillicothe, and say to him:  “You are a man of undoubted courage, but I am a paltroon and a coward, and I am going to hunt a hole and hide myself, where I will be out of danger when this battle is fought between freedom and slavery.”

I did not turn back, but revolving all these matters in my mind, reached the city of St. Joseph.  Here I had been commended by a friend to a merchant in the city, a member of the Christian Church.  He received me kindly and treated me courteously, but his partner in business did not seem to be of that mind.  He was all out of sorts, and gruffly said, “Kansas is a humbug.  It will not be settled in thirty years.”

In revolutions men live fast.  I had been ten days on my journey, and the man that now crossed the Missouri River at St. Joseph was not just the man that ten days before crossed the Mississippi at Quincy.  He was a wiser and a sadder man.

On the Kansas side the first company I met was a two-horse wagon load of men that had been exploring the Territory and were returning.  They seemed thoroughly disgusted, and said:  “The wind blows so hard in Kansas, it would blow a chicken up against the side of a barn and hold it there for twenty-four hours.”

“Kansas will not be settled in thirty years.”  So said my not very amiable friend in St. Joseph.  It is now somewhat more than thirty years, and Kansas has more than a million of inhabitants.  But the State has a higher boast to make than that it has so increased in wealth and population.  It has been the first State in the Union—­indeed, it has been the first government in the world—­to incorporate prohibition into its fundamental law; and this is the best possible criticism by which to mark its comparative progress in a Christian civilization.

CHAPTER IV.