Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/508

 Power; all its carefully selected instruments; all strongly prejudiced at the outset against the cause and the men of the Free-State Party; and yet, each one of them, as soon as he has fairly entered the field of his operations, offering such loud rebuke of the plans and projects of his own party as to provoke his speedy removal!—no strength of party attachment, no pliability of conscience, no hope of future favor, no dread of instant punishment, being sufficient to prevent him from turning against his own masters and colleagues! Even the Senators of the party catch the spirit of revolt; and the very godfather of the Kansas scheme,—its most efficient advocate,—the leading and organizing mind of it,—has become the strongest opponent and bitterest denouncer of the policy which directs its execution.

In this view of the case, may we not ask whether this base and cruel attempt at subduing Kansas has not gone far enough? Have not the circumstances shown that it is as impracticable as it is base and cruel? Or are we to see the despotism of the New World as insanely obstinate as the despotisms of the Old? Is there no warning, no instruction, to be derived from the examples of those older nations? An eloquent historian has recently depicted for us, in scenes which the memory can never lose, the mad attempts of the House of Stuart to Romanize England, to the loss of the most magnificent dominion the world ever saw; and another historian, scarcely less eloquent, has drawn a series of fearfully interesting pictures of the stern efforts of the Spaniards to impose a detested State and a more detested Church upon the burghers of the Netherlands. The spirit of James II., and the spirit of Philip II., was the same spirit which is now striving to force Slavery and Slave Law upon Kansas; and though the field of battle is narrower, and the scene less conspicuous, the consequences of the struggle are hardly of less moment. Kansas is the future seat of empire; she will yet give tone and law to the entire West; and they who are fighting there, in behalf of humanity and justice, do not fight for themselves alone, but for a large posterity.