The honorable Senator from Georgia, Mr. Toombs, announced some great truths to-day.  He said that mankind made a long step, a great stride, when they declared that minorities should not rule; and that a still higher and nobler advance had been made when it was decided that majorities could only rule through regular and legal forms.  He asserted this general doctrine with reference to the construction he proposed to give to the Lecompton constitution; and to say that the people of Kansas, unless they spoke through regular forms, cannot speak at all.  He will allow me to say, however, that the forms through which a majority speaks must be provided and established by competent authority, and his doctrine can have no application to the Lecompton constitution, unless he can first show that the legislature of Kansas was vested with legal authority to provide for the formation of a State constitution; for, until that can be shown, there could be no regular and legal forms through which the majority could speak.  But how does that Senator reconcile his doctrine with that avowed by the President, as to the futility of attempting, by constitutional provisions, to fetter the power of the people in changing their constitution at pleasure?  In no States of the Union so much as in some of the slaveholding States would such a doctrine as that be so apt to be abused by incendiary demagogues, disappointed and desperate politicians, in stirring up the people to assemble voluntarily in convention—­disregarding all the restrictions in their constitution—­and strike at the property of the slaveholder.

The honorable Senator from Kentucky inquired what, under this new doctrine, would prevent the majority of the people of the States of the Union from changing the present Federal Constitution, and abrogating all existing guarantees for the protection of the small States, and any peculiar or particular interest confined to a minority of the States of the Union.  The analogy, I admit, is not complete between the Federal Constitution and a constitution of a State; but the promulgation of the general principle, that a majority of the people are fettered by no constitutional restrictions in the exercise of their right to change their form of government, is dangerous.  That is quite enough for the purposes of demagogues and incendiary agitators.  When I read the special message of the President, I said to some friends that the message, taking it altogether, was replete with more dangerous heresies than any paper I had ever seen emanating, not from a President of the United States, but from any political club in the country, and calculated to do more injury.  I consider it in effect, and in its tendencies, as organizing anarchy.