We have at least laid the basis of a formidable and well-organized party, in opposition to the spread of slavery--that scheme which is the scandal of the country and the age. In those States of the Union which have now given such large majorities for Fremont, public opinion, which till lately has been shuffling and undecided in regard to the slavery question, is now clear, fixed, and resolute. If we look back to 1848, when we conducted a Presidential election on this very ground of opposition to the spread of slavery, we shall see that we have made immense strides towards the ascendancy which, if there be any grounds to hope for the perpetuity of free institutions, is yet to be ours. We were then comparatively weak, we are now strong; we then counted our thousands, we now count our millions; we could then point to our respectable minorities in a few States, we now point to State after State.... The cause is not going back--it is going rapidly forward; the free-soil party of 1848 is the nucleus of the Republican party of 1856; but with what accessions of numbers, of moral power, of influence, not merely in public assemblies, but at the domestic fireside! The _Evening Post_ was now as firmly a “black Republican” organ as the _Tribune_, and far more radical in tone than Henry J. Raymond’s _Times_. When in May, 1856, Brooks of South Carolina beat Sumner into insensibility at his desk in the Senate Chamber, it saw in the episode no mere flash of Southern hotheadedness, but evidence of a deep and consistent menace. It was a “base assault,” a bit of “cowardly brutality.” “Are we, too, slaves--slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?” But Bryant looked below the symptom to its cause: Violence reigns in the streets of Washington ... violence has now found its way into the Senate chamber. Violence lies in wait on all the navigable rivers and all the railways of Missouri, to obstruct those who pass from the free States into Kansas. Violence overhangs the frontiers of that territory like a storm-cloud charged with hail and lightning. Violence has carried election after election in that territory.... In short, violence is the order of the day; the North is to be pushed to the wall by it, and this plot will succeed if the people of the free States are as apathetic as the slaveholders are insolent.