Around the real leaders of thought their vassals are ranged. Davis, Toombs, Breckinridge, Yancey, Pryor, Wigfall, Wise, and others direct. Herbert, Keith, Lamar, Brooks, and a host of cavaliers are ready with trigger and cartel. The tone at Washington gives the keynote to the Californian agents of the Southern Rights movement. There are not enough Potters, Wades, and Landers, as yet. The Northern mind needs time to realize the deliberation of Secession. The great leaders of the free States are dead or in the gloomy retirement of age. Webster and Clay are no more. There are yet men of might to fight under the banners streaming with the northern lights of freedom. Douglas, Bell, Sumner, Seward, and Wade are drawing together. Grave-faced Abraham Lincoln moves out of the background of Western woods into the sunrise glow of Liberty's brightest day. On the Pacific coast, restraint has never availed. Here, ancestry and rank go for naught. Here, men meet without class pride. The struggle is more equal. California's Senator, David C. Broderick, was the son of an humble New York stone-cutter. He grapples with his wily colleague, Senator Gwin. It is hammer against rapier. Richard and Saladin. Beneath the banners of the chieftains the free lances of the Pacific range themselves. Neither doubts the courage of the opposing forces. The blood of the South has already followed William Walker, the gray-eyed man of destiny, to Sonora and Nicaragua. They were a splendid band of modern buccaneers. Henry A. Crabbe found that the Mexican escopetas are deadly in the hands of the maddened inhabitants of Arispe. Raousset de Boulbon sees his Southern followers fall under machete and revolver in northern Mexico. The Southern filibusters are superbly reckless. All are eager to repeat the glories of Texas and Mexico. They find that the Spanish races of Central America have learned bitter lessons from the loss of Texas. They know of the brutal conquest of California. The cry of "Muerte los Americanos!" rings from Tucson to Darien. The labors of conquest are harder now for the self-elected generalissimos of these robber bands. "Extension of territory" is a diplomatic euphemism for organized descents of desperate murderers. The wholesome lessons of the slaughter in Sonora, the piles of heads at Arispe, and the crowded graves of Rivas and Castillo, with the executions in Cuba, prove to the ambitious Southrons that they will receive from the Latins a "bloody welcome to hospitable graves." As the days glide into weeks and months, the thirst for blood of the martial generation overcrowding the South is manifest. On the threshold of grave events the leaders of Southern Rights restrain further foreign attempts. The chivalry is now needed at home. Foiled in Cuba and Central America, restrained by the general government from a new aggressive movement on Mexico, they decide to turn their faces to the North. They will carve out a new boundary line for slavery.