nment now stood as a unit on the side of this devilish
conspiracy. Everybody knew the Lecompton constitution was the work
of outside ruffians, and not of the people of the Territory, whose
Legislature in February, 1858, solemnly protested against their
admission under that Constitution, and whose protest was totally
unheeded. The Congressional debates during this period greatly
contributed to the anti-slavery education of the people, by more
clearly unmasking the real spirit and designs of the slaveholders.
We were treated to the kind of talk then becoming current about
"Northern mud-sills," "filthy operatives," the "ownership of labor
by capital," and the beauties and beatitudes of slavery. Such
maddened extremists as Hammond and Keitt of South Carolina, and such
blatant doughfaces as Petit of Indiana, became capital missionaries
in the cause of freedom. Their words were caught up by the press
of the free States, and added their beneficent help to the work so
splendidly going forward through the providential agency of "Uncle
Tom's Cabin."

In the meantime, freedom had made large gains in the composition
of the Thirty-fifth Congress, which now had charge of the Lecompton
swindle. The Senate contained twenty Republican members and the
House ninety-two. Kansas had not been forced into the Union as a
slave State, but she was helpless at the feet of the Executive.
In the midst of the angry debate a new proposition was brought
forward, on the twenty-third of April, which was even more detestable
than the Lecompton bill itself. This was known as the "English
bill," which offered Kansas a very large and tempting land grant,
if she would come into the Union under the Lecompton Constitution,
but provided that if she voted to reject the land grant she should
neither receive the land nor be admitted as a State until the
Territory acquired a population sufficient to elect a representative
to the House. The infamy of this proposition was heightened by
the fact that these long-suffering pioneers, weary and harassed by
their protracted struggle and longing for peace, were naturally
tempted to purchase it at any price. It was a proposition of
gigantic bribery, after bluster and bullying had been exhausted.
It was, in fact, both a bribe and a menace, and measured at once
the political morality of the men who favored it, and the extremity
to which the slave-holders were driven in the prosecution of their
desperate enterprise.