Sheriff Jones was beside himself with joy.  In frantic excitement he said, “I have done it!  I have done it!  This is the happiest moment of my life!  I determined to make the fanatics bow before me in the dust and kiss the Territorial laws, and I have done it!  The writs have been executed.  Boys, you are dismissed.”  It will be doing Senator David R. Atchison, Ex-Vice-President of the United States, a kindness to conclude simply that he was drunk, otherwise he displayed utter savagery and barbarism.  He inculcated gallantry to ladies, but said:  “If you find any woman with arms in her hands, tread her under foot as you would a snake.”  The Caucassian white woman of Lawrence had no more rights of self-protection than the slaves of a South Carolina rice plantation—­they were wholly and absolutely at the mercy of their masters!

We have no comments to make on the work of this drunken rabble; but there is one man that must be held to a terrible responsibility before the judgment-seat of posterity.  Gov.  Wilson Shannon was not drunk:  and it is to be presumed he had read that Constitution of the United States which he had so often sworn to support.  He knew, therefore, that this document stipulates: 

1.  “That the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed;” yet he showed a fixed purpose to deprive the Lawrence people of their arms.

2.  The Governor knew that the Constitution guarantees “freedom of speech and of the press” to the American people; yet the burning of these printing presses was an attack on the freedom of the press.

3.  The Constitution guarantees that “in all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial.”  Property of large value was destroyed because its owners were charged with high crimes and misdemeanors; yet the owners of this property had never been given a trial.

4.  Gov.  Shannon alleged that it was treasonable for the people of Kansas Territory to frame a State Constitution without an enabling act from Congress; yet California had done this very thing, and under that Constitution had been admitted as a State.

5.  He treated the Free State men as traitors, because they would not admit the legality of the Lecompton Territorial Legislature.  But the majority of the Investigating Committee held the same view with the Lawrence people, and Congress affirmed the same judgment in permanently unseating Mr. Whitfield as Territorial delegate to Congress.

Would that men could remember that there is a hereafter; that to-morrow forever sits in judgment on to-day. There are three men most conspicuous in the sacking of Lawrence.  Let us look at them in the electric light of the awful to-morrow. Since the Kansas struggle had begun David R. Atchison had made himself the most conspicuous figure.  He was the representative of the John C. Calhoun school of Southern politics, and from the hour of the destruction