Then followed the various attempts to overthrow and extinguish free speech in the capital of the nation by the use of the bludgeon, to extend slavery by illegal and bloodthirsty means over the soil of Kansas, to strengthen the enactments of the fugitive slave law by new and more offensive provisions, and to cause the authority of the Slave Power to be openly and confessedly recognized throughout the whole land, as it had been for years secretly and warily predominant. The opposition to these measures of aggression ceased to be wholly confined to the mere handful of technical abolitionists, and to spread and to take possession of the minds of the whole people, exciting surprise and alarm, and arousing them to some slight efforts at resistance. With this rising tendency to resist arose in like measure the tendency of the slaveholding power to invade. The alternative was quietly but resolutely chosen in the minds of the leading politicians of the South to 'rule or ruin.' Preparation was made for retaining the absolute control of the General Government at Washington, and for extending the influence of the peculiar institution over the whole North and all adjacent countries, so long as that policy should prove practicable; and, if by any contingency defeated in it, to break up the Union as it existed, and reconstruct it upon terms which should place the slaveholding aristocracy in that front rank of authority without question, to which, as a settled conviction, ever present and dominant in their minds, they alone, of all men, are preeminently entitled.