The contest, which, beginning in Kansas, reaches us will be transferred soon from Congress to that broader stage, where every citizen is not only spectator, but actor; and to their judgment I confidently turn. To the People, about to exercise the electoral franchise, in choosing a Chief Magistrate of the Republic, I appeal, to vindicate the electoral franchise in Kansas. Let the ballot-box of the Union, with multitudinous might, protect the ballot-box in that Territory. Let the voters everywhere, while rejoicing in their own rights, help guard the equal rights of distant fellow-citizens, that the shrines of popular institutions, now desecrated, may be sanctified anew,--that the ballot-box, now plundered, may be restored,--and that the cry, “I am an American citizen,” shall no longer be impotent against outrage. In just regard for free labor, which you would blast by deadly contact with slave labor,--in Christian sympathy with the slave, whom you would task and sell,--in stern condemnation of the Crime consummated on that beautiful soil,--in rescue of fellow-citizens, now subjugated to Tyrannical Usurpation,--in dutiful respect for the early Fathers, whose aspirations are ignobly thwarted,--in the name of the Constitution outraged, of the Laws trampled down, of Justice banished, of Humanity degraded, of Peace destroyed, of Freedom crushed to earth,--and in the name of the Heavenly Father, whose service is perfect Freedom, I make this last appeal. Mr. Sumner spoke for two days. As soon as he took his seat, the storm which had been preparing broke forth. Mr. Cass was the first to speak. He began by saying that he had “listened with equal regret and surprise” to the speech of Mr. Sumner, which he characterized as “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body.” Mr. Douglas followed in a tirade of personality, in which he renewed the old assault of two years before, charging Mr. Sumner with defying the Constitution, when he exclaimed with regard to the rendition of a fugitive slave, “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?”[139] The speech of Mr. Sumner was characterized in the most offensive terms. “He seems to get up a speech as in Yankee-land they get up a bed-quilt.” Then again: “Is it his object to provoke some of us to kick him as we would a dog in the street, that he may get sympathy upon the just chastisement?” Then again: “We have had another dish of the classics served up,--classic allusions, each one only distinguished for its lasciviousness and obscenity,--each one drawn from those portions of the classics which all decent professors in respectable colleges cause to be suppressed, as unfit for decent young men to read. Sir, I cannot repeat the words. I should be condemned as unworthy of entering decent society, if I repeated those obscene, vulgar terms which have