To maintain their cause with the country at large, and make it one on which the opponents of slavery could unite, the free-State men of Kansas lived for a time nearly in chaos rather than forfeit the name of law-abiding people. In this they showed admirable self-restraint. To maintain themselves in Kansas they were forced to adopt the tactics of their assailants at last, and deal blow for blow. Cultured people were roughened by this sort of life. It made them reckless. It weakened respect for law, even with the law-abiding. It brought material progress to a standstill, and engendered lifelong enmities among men who were to live together as neighbors. Social improvement was put back years. The very existence of a conflict had the tendency to bring bad men to the front, whose influence proved a hinderance to the settling of order in the State. The contest in Kansas proved Douglas wrong and John Brown right, in so far as the question of peaceful competition for the soil was involved in it. In a national sense it was therefore but the prelude to the great Civil War of the century. FOOTNOTES [1] CONSTITUTION PROHIBITING SLAVERY, known in history as the Topeka Constitution. The State finally came into the Union under a Constitution framed at Wyandotte in 1859, ratified October of that year at the polls. [2] INDICTED FOR TREASON. The courts were supported by Federal troops with whom the free-State men would not risk a conflict. Robinson and other "treason prisoners" suffered several months' imprisonment. It was a clever plan for depriving the free-State party of its leaders. [3] ACQUIRING STRENGTH. Since its publication in 1852, people everywhere had been reading Mrs. H. B. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a book which perhaps did more to consolidate public opinion against slavery, by directing attention to its worst evils, than all the political discussions of the time put together. In this view it deserves a place in the train of events following upon the compromises of 1850. Another episode of like tendency was the assault made on Senator Sumner by Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina, in the Senate Chamber, arising out of the Kansas troubles (1856). Still another was the decision of Justice Taney in the case of Dred Scott, a slave, declaring that slavery had a right to exist everywhere in the public domain until forbidden by State laws.