their immediate object, for it was openly proclaimed by all; they intended to vote in Kansas, though non-residents, and to elect a Territorial Legislature, which would transform it into a Slave-State. Their scheme was to seize hold of the law-making power by violence, and then render their illegal acts legal. A curious mental condition was this of the Missourians, yet their leaders upheld it by argument as well as by fervid appeals to conscience and to eternal justice, invoking even the God of battles. March 30th the election took place. In a voting population of about 3,000, according to a census taken a few weeks before the election, 6,300 votes were cast, nearly four-fifths of them by Missourians who took possession of most of the pollingplaces, ousted any recalcitrant judges, and proceeded to accept their own ballots for their own candidates. The result was a complete triumph of Missourians choosing themselves for Kansas legislators, who were 39 in number. The Governor, Reeder, had to canvass the returns, and, though an appointee of the Democratic Administration, did not relish the Missouri method of undoing the ballot through the ballot. Still he gave certificates of election to all but seven, looking into the muzzles of cocked pistols, it is said, which had also a significant power of speech, saying to him: We shall spit fire if you go behind the returns. In the seven districts where

ballots were thrown out on account of informalities too brazen, a new election took place which resulted in the choice of seven Kansas legislators for Kansas, who, however, were soon unseated by the Missouri members, as usurpers of the sacred rights of Missourians.

Contemplating these events we have to ask ourselves: Is here a mere local trouble, a border foray of outlaws, or is this spirit getting to be general in the South? Is the ballot, the great Anglo-Saxon instrumentality for obviating violence, to be set aside by violence? Is the majority no longer to rule in this country? If so, war must come, since the means of all peaceful settlement between contending parties is broken into fragments and scattered to the winds. Ominous of 1861 is already 1855 in Kansas.

The Missourians declared undisguisedly that their purpose was to make Kansas a SlaveState without any regard for the wishes of her people. To that end they had now seized the legislative power of the Territory, which rightfully belonged to its actual settlers. Already the Missourians supposed that they had both the executive and the judicial branches of the Territorial organization. The Governor and other administrative officials were appointed by the President, Franklin Pierce, who was dominated by the slave power of which the head was already Jefferson Davis,

Secretary of War at Washington. The Judiciary of the Territory likewise was a Presidential appointment, and would not fail to cooperate with the Missourians, as time showed. The scheme of the invaders, accordingly, was to get control of the Legislature, preventing the inhabitants from governing themselves, since they were manifesting a decided tendency toward wheeling Kansas into the company of the FreeStates, from which most of them had come. Unfortunately Governor Reeder had legalized in form the illegal act of the invaders, through his certificates of election. Thus illegality was made legal and was enthroned not only as law, but as the law-making power of Kansas. Reeder will repent of his action, and will valiantly battle against the consequences of his own mistake, showing his deepest worth by making undone his own ill-doing, as far as lies in his power.

Such is the fierce contradiction in the institutional order of Kansas, rending to pieces her ethical life and making her truly a perverted world. The established authority is used to disestablish the foundation of authority, the consent of the governed; the three powers of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, are in the hands of those who intend to employ them for undermining their source, the will of the people. The forms of free institutions are turned into destroyers of freedom, and the law

is driven to the point of stabbing itself and letting its own heart's blood. In such a perverted institutional world man cannot live in peace. How can he be even legal when illegality makes the law? Still he must remain law-abiding till he can somehow re-make the law by which he abides.

Over all these occurrences gleams the question: Was the act of the Missourians representative? Did it reach beyond their State even to the Atlantic? Did it reveal the spirit and the rising purpose of the South? Many and loud were the exultations in the newspapers from Westport in Missouri to Charleston in South Carolina; the event was hailed as the certain triumph of Slavery. On the whole the Southerners made this deed of their borderland their own, approving it and setting it up for imitation. Still there were protests, some of them pronounced but most of them suppressed. The extremists were in the saddle and were bent on riding at the top of their speed. The conservatives were carried along in the fateful sweep of the time, even when they saw the stream plunging toward a Niagara cataract.

We have called these invaders Missourians, since they were chiefly recruited from Northwestern Missouri, whose wind-lands, containing the finest soil in the United States according to a competent observer, were occupied at an early

day by slaveholders, who became slavery's strongest partisans. But Missouri is a large State, and as a whole hardly approved of these border invasions instigated from the Platte Purchase. This inference may be reasonably drawn from Missouri's vote for Douglas and his Popular Sovereignty in 1860, after his breach with the South just on this Kansas question. Moreover Missouri had during these years (1856-60) an active minority in favor of making it a Free State.

The question of questions, then, looming up over the Border is, Shall this new Territory be tilled with the labor of slaves or of freemen? The conflict has opened on the dividing line between the settled and the unsettled lands of the national domain, on the boundary between States already in the Union and those which are hereafter to come into the Union. We We may well regard it as the visible demarcation of the present from the future; indeed we shall soon see it transformed into a battle-line between the old and the new order, between the outgoing and the incoming civilization. The struggle will reach far beyond the confines of Kansas, will involve the whole United States, and will have an abiding influence upon the destiny of both Americas and of the entire world. So it must be said that in this remote border-land is enacted a scene in the grand drama of Universal History,