constitutions to withhold that power from the legislatures.  In those days, by common consent, the spread of the black man’s bondage to the new countries was prohibited, but now Congress decides that it will not continue the prohibition and the Supreme Court decides that it could not if it would.  In those days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed and sneered at and construed, and hawked at and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.  All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him.  Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry.  They have him in his prison-house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him.  One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key—­the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.”

There is not room to quote the many other equally forcible points in Mr. Lincoln’s speech.  Our narrative must proceed to other significant events in the great pro-slavery reaction.  Thus far the Kansas experiment had produced nothing but agitation, strife, and bloodshed.  First the storm in Congress over repeal; then a mad rush of emigration to occupy the Territory.  This was followed by the Border Ruffian invasions, in which Missouri voters elected a bogus territorial legislature, and the bogus legislature enacted a code of bogus laws.  In turn, the more rapid emigration from free States filled the Territory with a majority of free-State voters, who quickly organized a compact free-State party, which sent a free-State constitution, known as the Topeka Constitution, to Congress, and applied for admission.  This movement proved barren, because the two houses of Congress were divided in sentiment.  Meanwhile, President Pierce recognized the bogus laws, and issued proclamations declaring the free-State movement illegal and insurrectionary; and the free-State party had in its turn baffled the enforcement of the bogus laws, partly by concerted action of nonconformity and neglect, partly by open defiance.  The whole finally culminated in a chronic border war between Missouri raiders on one hand, and free-State guerrillas on the other; and it became necessary to send Federal troops to check the disorder.  These were instructed by Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, that “rebellion must be crushed.”  The future Confederate President little suspected the tremendous prophetic import of his order.