Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/126

118 look upon it no more. It would come back:

And this dreaded spectre, though a beneficent angel with healing on his wings in truth, will push yet many traitorous or cowardly sycophants from the stools they disgrace, and substitute in their stead men who will quiet Agitation by Justice. Let the men of Kansas remember that a yet greater trust than that of providing for their own interests and rights is in their hands. The battle they are to fight in this quarrel is for the whole North, for the whole country, for the world. Let them address themselves unto it with calmness, with prudence, with watchfulness, with courage. They are beset on every side by crafty and desperate enemies. Greedy land-jobbers, in haste to be rich, will try to persuade them that not to be innocent is to be wise. Timid timeservers will urge a submission which promises peace, though it be but a solitude that is called so. Rampant Pro-slavery will exalt its horn against Righteousness and try again the virtue of ruffianism to prevail against civilization. The barbarians will hang anew upon the borders, ready to complete the conquest they began so well. And above all, a majority of the men who are to pass upon the votes are the creatures of the Administration, who know, by the example of their predecessors, that the suspicion of honesty will be fatal to all their hopes of preferment, and that they can purchase reward only by procuring, quocunque modo, the acceptance of the proposition of Congress. But still the power is in the hands of the Free-State men, if they choose to put it forth. Let them organize such a scrutiny everywhere, that fraud and violence cannot escape detection and exposure. Let them observe most rigidly all the technical rules imposed upon the electors, that no vote may be lost. Let them come to the polls by thousands, and trample under their feet the shabby bribe for which they are asked to trade away their independence and their virtue. Let them be thus faithful, and never be weary of maintaining the Agitation, which is proved, by the very dread their enemies have of it, to be the way to their victory. Thus they will be sure to triumph, conquering their right to create their own government, and erect a free commonwealth on the ruins of the tyranny they have overthrown. And Kansas, at no distant period, will be welcomed by her Free Sisters to her place among them, with no stain of bribes in her hands, and with no soil of meanness upon her garments. And then the "peace" and "prosperity," which President Buchanan saw in vision on the eve of May-day, will indeed prevail and be established, while the blackness of infamy will brood forever over the memory of the magistrate who used the highest office of the Republic to perpetuate the wrongs of the Slave by the sacrifice of the rights of the Citizen.