And all this was perpetrated under pretences of popular rights. Freedom was betrayed by a kiss. In defiance of uninterrupted prescription down to our day, early sustained at the South as well as the North, leaning at once on Jefferson and Washington, sanctioned by all the authoritative names of our history, and beginning with the great Ordinance by which Slavery was prohibited in the Northwest,--it was pretended that the people of the United States, who are the proprietors of the national domain, and who, according to the Constitution, may “make all needful rules and regulations” for its government, nevertheless were not its sovereigns, that they had no power to interdict Slavery there, but that this eminent dominion resided in the few settlers, called squatters, whom chance or a desire to better their fortunes first hurried into these places. To this precarious handful, sprinkled over immense spaces, it was left, without any constraint from Congress, to decide whether into these vast unsettled lands, as into the veins of an infant, should be poured the festering poison of Slavery, destined, as time advances, to show itself in cancers and leprous disease, or whether they should be filled with all the glowing life of Freedom. And this great power, transferred from Congress to these few settlers, was hailed by the new-fangled name of _Squatter Sovereignty_. It was fit that the original outrage perpetrated under such pretences should be followed by other outrages perpetrated in defiance of these pretences. In the race of emigration the Freedom-loving citizens of the North promised to obtain the ascendency, and, in the exercise of the conceded sovereignty of the settlers, to prohibit Slavery. The Slave Oligarchy was aroused to other efforts. Of course it stuck at nothing. On the day of election, when this vaunted popular sovereignty was first invoked, hirelings from Missouri, having no home in the Territory, entered it in bands of fifties and hundreds, and, assuming an electoral franchise to which they had no claim, trampled under foot the Constitution and laws. Violently, ruthlessly, the polls were possessed by these invaders. The same Northern President, who did not shrink from unblushing complicity in the original outrage, now assumed another complicity. Though prompt to lavish the Treasury, the Army, and the Navy of the Republic in hunting a single slave through the streets of Boston, he could see the Constitution and laws which he was sworn to protect, and those popular rights which he had affected to promote, all struck down in Kansas,--and then give new scope to these invaders by the removal of the faithful Governor, who had become obnoxious to the Slave Oligarchy because he would not become its tool, and the substitution of another, who vindicated the dishonest choice by making haste, on his first arrival there, to embrace the partisans of Slavery. The Legislature, which was constituted by the overthrow of the