Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/124

116 tools of the Administration shall be instructed to allow the presence of a sufficient population to entitle a State to a Representative.

If they consent to be erected into a Slave State by accepting the bribe, they will come into the Union by a puff of Presidential breath, though having only forty thousand inhabitants, with two Senators and a Representative, and all the advantages incident to Federal connection and patronage. Should they reject it, they will be left, it may be, to years of Territorial annoyance, and the annoyance of a Slave Territory, too, till Government officials shall discover their numbers to amount to near a hundred thousand, and possibly to much more, after the next census has newly apportioned the House. With Slavery, they have proffered to them broad lands to help cover their wide expanse with an iron reticulation of railways, developing their resources and multiplying their material prosperity, at the slight cost of their consistency and their honor. Without it, they may have to stand shivering at the gate of the Union, blasted by the "cold shade" of our American aristocracy, and far removed from the genial sunshine of national favor and bounty. Truly did Senator Wilson say that Congress approached Kansas at once with a bribe and a threat. Never was the devilish cunning of Slaveholding politics more strikingly illustrated than by the insidious vileness of this proposition. It had been bad enough, surely, had we been called upon to rejoice, as over a great triumph of the right, at the concession to Kansas of the sovereignty of settling her own institutions in her own way, had such been granted. Nothing could be more simple and natural, in a case of conflicting assertions and opposite beliefs as to the state of opinion there, than to remit the decision of the doubt to a fresh vote. Had any other interest than that in human beings been involved, such a disposition of the whole matter would have excited neither remark nor opposition. Nothing, perhaps, could exemplify the control Slavery has obtained over the affairs of the country more strongly than the power it has had to hinder this simple remedy of an alleged wrong or error,—and this, by procuring the defection of sordid Northern Representatives from what they confessed to be the right, to this corrupt evasion,—an evasion designed to fit the people of Kansas for servitude by tempting them to sacrifice their self-respect and their honor. Let these miscreants make haste to seize the price of their perfidy before popular contempt and loathing shall sweep them forever out of sight into the abyss of infamy and forgetfulness which is appointed for the traitors to Liberty. If the question of the real will of the people of Kansas had been referred back to them for settlement, it would have been humiliating enough to have had to exult over it as a victory of Freedom. With what depth of shame, then, should we contemplate the compassing of their end by the Slavocrats, through the venal surrender of the rights so long and so manfully asserted, for so paltry a temptation!

But we do not apprehend a consummation so devoutly to be deprecated. We believe that the people of Kansas will spurn the bribe and refuse to eat the dirt that is set before them for a banquet. They will reject the insulting proffer with contempt, and fall back upon their reserved right of resistance, passive or active, as their circumstances may advise. They will not be so base as to desert the post of honor they have sought in the great fight for freedom and maintained so long and so well, disappointing and throwing into confusion the distant allies who have stood behind them in their most evil hours, for all the lands that President and Congress have to give. It is, indeed, a momentous crisis for them, and we have faith to believe that they will not be wanting to its demands. The eyes of the lovers of liberty everywhere are earnestly watching to see how they will come out from the ordeal by fire and by gold to which they are subjected. What Boston was in 1775, and Paris in 1789, is Kansas