Against this Territory, thus fortunate in position and population, a Crime has been committed which is without example in the records of the Past. Not in plundered provinces or in the cruelties of selfish governors will you find its parallel; and yet there is an ancient instance which may show at least the path of justice. In the terrible impeachment by which the Roman Orator has blasted through all time the name of Verres, charges were, that he had carried away productions of Art, and had violated the sacred shrines. But, amidst charges of robbery and sacrilege, the enormity which most aroused the indignant voice of his accuser, and which still stands forth with strongest distinctness, arousing the sympathetic indignation of all who read the story, was, that away in Sicily he had scourged a citizen of Rome,--that the cry, “I am a Roman citizen,” had been interposed in vain against the lash of the tyrant governor. It was in the presence of the Roman Senate that this arraignment proceeded,--in a temple of the Forum,--amidst crowds such as no orator had ever before drawn together, thronging the porticos and colonnades, even clinging to the house-tops and neighboring slopes, and under the anxious gaze of witnesses summoned from the scene of crime. But an audience grander far, of higher dignity, of more various people, and of wider intelligence,--the countless multitude of succeeding generations, in every land where eloquence has been studied, or where the Roman name has been recognized,--has listened to the accusation, and throbbed with condemnation of the criminal. Sir, speaking in an age of light, and in a land of constitutional liberty, where the safeguards of elections are justly placed among the highest triumphs of civilization, I fearlessly assert that the wrongs of much-abused Sicily, thus memorable in history, were small by the side of the wrongs of Kansas, where the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, are desecrated,--where the ballot-box, more precious than any work in ivory or marble from the cunning hand of Art, is plundered,--and where the cry, “I am an American citizen,” is interposed in vain against outrage of every kind, even upon life itself. Are you against robbery? I hold it up to your scorn. Are you against sacrilege? I present it for your execration. Are you for the protection of American citizens? I show you how their dearest rights are cloven down, while a Tyrannical Usurpation seeks to install itself on their very necks!