We are willing to believe that the bulk of the Democrats in both Houses of Congress, who had the virtue to defy the threats and cajolements of their party-leaders, when this great public crime was demanded at their hands, were sincere in the resistance they opposed to this subversion of all the principles in which they had been bred, and of which their party had always professed to be the special defence and guard. But the mantle of our charity is not wide enough to cover up the base treachery of those men who, acknowledging and demonstrating the right, devised or consented to the villany which was to crush or to cripple it. That the final shape which the Lecompton juggle took was an invention of the enemy, cunningly contrived to win by indirection what was too dangerous to be attempted by open violence, is a conclusion from which no candid mind can escape, after a full consideration of the case. The defection of so large a body of Northern Democrats from the side of the Slaveholding Directory was doubtless a significant and startling fact, suggestive of dangerous insubordination on the part of allies who had ever been found sure and steadfast in every jeopardy of Slavery. And it made a resort to guile necessary to carry the point which it was not prudent to press to the extremity of force. The Slaveholders are not fastidious as to the means by which they reach their end. Though they might have preferred to hew their way to their design with a high hand, and to put down all opposition by bought or bullied majorities, backed by the strong arm of the nation, yet they never refuse to compromise and palter when the path to success lies through stratagems or frauds. The skill in this instance, as in all others, by which they propose to win everything under the show of yielding somewhat, is worthy of Machiavel or of Lucifer, and is far above the capacity of the paltry Northern tool who is permitted to enjoy the infamy of the invention which he was employed to utter. The Slaveholders, like other despots, do their dirty work by proxy, and scorn the wretched instruments they use, and then fling from them in disgust.