Mr. Buchanan and his compeers should have known before they passed the Kansas bill, that when the people of an American State or territory once laid their hands upon the power to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, they held the power upon which free institutions and slave institutions alike rested in the American States, and that that power and its free exercise could never be taken from the people by any Supreme Court or the dogma of any political party, and any systematized attempt to take it away would be met by resistance that would shiver the Union to fragments. The sovereignty of the people or true democracy, like the elements of fire and water, is a gentle and a genial thing, when the hand of representative government rests kindly upon it, but if that hand dares to essay a wrong, then will the power of the people become like the burning lava of the volcano, when its pent-up fires escape, or the resistless waves of the ocean, when the storm moves over its depths. The courts may guide and direct and check the popular will, but when a great political idea, like that of the rightful sovereignty of the States, either in the Union or in the territories, has taken root and settled into a well-defined opinion in the popular mind, the courts must let it alone; it is for them then to follow the popular will, not to lead it. Law is the voice of the people. Let the courts that assume to be the oracles of the law, see to it that they mistake not the people's voice, especially on those great political questions that touch the fountains of a nation's life.