together on American soil, while, for the time being, all protection is annulled, and the whole Territory is enslaved. Private griefs mingle their poignancy with public wrongs. I do not dwell on the anxieties of families exposed to sudden assault, and lying down to rest with the alarms of war ringing in the ears, not knowing that another day may be spared to them. Throughout this bitter winter, with the thermometer at thirty degrees below zero, the citizens of Lawrence were constrained to sleep under arms, with sentinels pacing constant watch against surprise. Our souls are wrung by individual instances. In vain do we condemn the cruelties of another age, the refinements of torture to which men were doomed, the rack and thumb-screw of the Inquisition, the last agonies of the regicide Ravaillac, “Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s bed of steel”; for kindred outrages disgrace these borders. Murder stalks, Assassination skulks in the tall grass of the prairie, and the vindictiveness of man assumes unwonted forms. A preacher of the Gospel has been ridden on a rail, then thrown into the Missouri, fastened to a log, and left to drift down its muddy, tortuous current. And lately we have the tidings of that enormity without precedent, a deed without a name, where a candidate for the Legislature was most brutally gashed with knives and hatchets, and then, after weltering in blood on the snow-clad earth, trundled along, with gaping wounds, to fall dead before the face of his wife. It is common to drop a tear of sympathy over the sorrows of our early fathers, exposed to the stealthy assault of the savage foe,--and an eminent American artist[75] has pictured this scene in a marble group, on the front of the National Capitol, where the uplifted tomahawk is arrested by the strong arm and generous countenance of the pioneer, whose wife and children find shelter at his feet; but now the tear must be dropped over the sorrows of fellow-citizens building a new State in Kansas, and exposed to the perpetual assault of murderous robbers from Missouri. Hirelings, picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization, having the form of men,-- “Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept All by the name of dogs,”-- leashed together by secret signs and lodges, renew the incredible atrocities of the Assassins and the Thugs,--showing the blind submission of the Assassins to the Old Man of the Mountain in robbing Christians on the road to Jerusalem, and the heartlessness of the Thugs, who, avowing that murder is their religion, waylay travellers on the great road from Agra to Delhi,--with the more deadly bowie-knife for the dagger of the Assassin, and the more deadly revolver for the noose of the Thug.