The attempt of Mr. Buchanan's administration to force slavery upon Kansas by means of the Lecompton Constitution, against the real sentiment of the people, and against the true intent and meaning of the organic law of Kansas, and failing in that, the attempt to override the principle of popular sovereignty, by means of a false construction of the Dred Scott decision, roused to renewed zeal and combined all the Northern elements of opposition to slavery, and in the excitement of angry passion that has followed, the great compromise of 1850, and the true character of that measure, and its legitimate consequent, the erasure of the Missouri compromise line, have been obscured in the public mind, and both have lost their hold upon the calm judgments of the people. Why is this? Are not the laws that now stand upon the statute book of the nation, as the compromise measures of 1850, the same as they were in 1852, when they were endorsed by nearly 3,000,000 of votes--almost the unanimous vote of the nation? Is the law of the Kansas and Nebraska act, annulling the Missouri compromise line, a different law from what it was in 1856, when it was triumphantly sustained against Fremont and the Philadelphia platform? No man can say the laws are not the same. As they were then, so are they now. If right in principle and good then, they are equally right and good now. Were the people senseless or did they mean nothing when they endorsed those laws? No man dare say that. Why is it then that the Democratic party, which triumphed in 1852 and in 1856 on these very measures, is now a divided and broken army and almost panic-stricken, and its opponents, the advocates of Congressional prohibition of slavery, with a man at their head without a record as a statesman and almost unknown to the nation, carrying in their train all the fiercest elements of anti-slavery agitation, are already boasting of sure success? No satisfactory answer can be given to these questions, except the fact that the administration of James Buchanan, false to the principles on which it was placed in power, has attempted by intervention in favor of slavery, to destroy the very principle which is the life of the compromise of 1850 and of the Kansas and Nebraska law of 1854. Those great measures and their ablest and most consistent champion, have alike been stabbed in the house of their friends. By the course of the Buchanan administration, the people of the North have been made to believe that the principle of non-intervention is a sham; that the compromise of 1850 and the erasure of the Missouri line in 1852 were fraudulent schemes to cheat the people into a consent to extend slavery all over the national territory; and the cry is echoed all through the North: the nation's plighted faith is broken, the landmarks of freedom are removed, the barbarism of slavery will spread over the land! Is there reason in this cry, for argument it cannot be called? There is none.