istration is with the Missourians, and is secretly egging them on through Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War and head of the inner slave-holding circle at the Capital. To be sure the partisans of the Administration could show to Reeder his own certificates of election legalizing that Territorial Legislature which he now claimed to be fraudulent. Thus he was caught in that peculiar Kansas grind between legality which is wrong and illegality which is right. But Reeder acknowledged his mistake and certainly tried to undo it with a considerable outlay of energy and ability. Already we have noted him as one of the leading men in the Free-State Convention at Big Springs.

But the chief thing which is brought to the surface by these events connected with Reeder's removal, is the process which they reveal, and which generates them in order. As this will continue to the end of the Kansas troubles, we may bring out its nature more fully, by stating its main points in brief:

1st. Washington. The source of the irritation goes back to the Administration, which had resolved to make Kansas a Slave-State. It was soon found that the Free-State men had the majority, and so violence was to be employed by means of the Missourians. Jefferson Davis has always had the credit of being the main mover in this scheme. The minority must still rule,

otherwise the South, being now the minority of the Nation, will have to give up its leadership maintained for two generations.

2nd. Kansas. The resistance of the Free-State people to Slave-Stateism led to the invasions, the arbitrary actions of the administrative offi. cials, the abuses committed by the legislative and judicial powers of the Territory. Outrage, tor

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ture, murder were the result, with outeries and shrieks of pain from its victim. Bleeding Kansas,' as the time phrased it, became the allabsorbing theme of the Folk-Soul, rousing sympathy or perchance satire according to the man.

3rd. The Nation. Between the center at Washington and the border of Kansas lay the listening Nation, whose ears were filled with the echoes of these Kansas shrieks, reverberated in the North by press, pulpit, hustings. Eli Thayer got even the Yankee schoolmistresses to working for Kansas, and they too are known to have tongues. Of course the South also had its reverberating machine at work, but it was a puny piping in comparison to the Northern reduplicator thousand-mouthed. It is still amusing to see the Southern senators and journals curse the big Northern machine in a kind of helplessness. Why did not they construct a similar one? That was indeed a striking part of their weakness; but of this more will be said later.

Such, however, is the round of this historic

process: from Washington to Kansas, then from Kansas back to the People lying between, who are finally to determine Washington. Evidently here a mighty discipline of a nation is taking place for some very important future task. The American Folk-Soul, so we may name it, is in great distress, which is growing greater, quite beyond the point of further endurance. It is divided within itself into two antipathetic, if not warring halves, which get to downright battle in Kansas. It is becoming a cleft Folk-Soul, cleft into North and South, or into Free-States and Slave-States. The question is burning in every heart: Shall this so-called Union remain dual, in an eternal wrangle or shall it be made one and a real Union? The Spirit of the Age, the Genius of History may be heard commanding first in a whisper which is soon to break out into thunder tones: The strain of destiny woven into the Constitution at its birth and burdening it with its own deepest self-contradiction must now be eliminated; it can no longer remain halfslave, half-free, in the prophetic words of the coming leader.

The cleft Folk-Soul is becoming aware of its cleavage, and is slowly resolving to get rid of the rent somehow. The whole Kansas discipline with its ever-recurring process is to bring the People to a consciousness of their halved condition. They wake up to find themselves not a Union,

and are beginning to grasp for the means of becoming a Union. The dissonance sounding back from the plains of Kansas and stirring the Folk-Soul with a deep response, brings it to feel its own dissonance. Such is the folk-psychological process now going on, which is the profound historic purpose underlying and controlling these Kansas events.

Say the Missourians to the Kansans: We intend to drive you around up to Nebraska, where you belong. There you can have your FreeState on a line with the other Free-States. But this territory of Kansas is ours, and we shall make it a Slave-State, thus keeping the Union divided, half-slave and half-free.

Say the Kansans to the Missourians: Nebraska is indeed a goodly land, but there we feel no soulcompelling principle at stake along its latitudinal bound running westward. So we pass down to Kansas and to conflict, forming a new longitudinal bound, and building along it against slavery our bulwark of farms, on which indeed we intend to raise corn and potatoes with our own right hand, but also to try the issue of the age which has written upon our hearts the command: No more Slave-States are to be born of mother Union, our beloved, prolific, State-bearing mother.

That indeed may well be called the new Union

or the beginning thereof, whose evolution is the very soul of this Ten-Years' War.

It was not long before the pro-slavery party saw that they had been thwarted. Their deed of violence had united the Free-State men, and had called forth Robinson's scheme of an antigovernment, which quite counteracted the work of the Territorial Legislature. What was to be done? A blow must be struck, and again it was resolved to resort to violence. Another invasion of the Missourians was the plan, but this time its purpose was not to vote but to destroy. The Free-State center, Lawrence, home of Robinson and supposed source of all agitation was to be wiped out literally; the FreeState men were to be driven away; but chiefly the anti-government was to be obliterated. Accordingly a new irritant or instrument of torture was to be applied to Kansas from the outside, trying to force her to be that which she is not and can never be.

So we come to the Second Invasion of Kansas from Missouri, planned and carried out, some eight or nine months after the first one already narrated, which has evidently failed of its purpose. The Legislature then elected holds its sessions indeed, and passes laws, which, however, as they never came from the People, never go back to the People, but remain legal phantoms without the blood of life.