f an actual self-government--what, now, was
to be its history?

North of the fated compromise line, west of the admitted slave
state of Missouri, lay other rich lands ripe for the plow, ready
for Americans who had never paid more than a dollar an acre for
land, or for aliens who had never been able to own any land at all.
Kansas and Nebraska, names conceived but not yet born,--what would
they be? Would the compromise of this last summer of 1850 hold the
balances of power even? Could it save this republic, still young
and needy, for yet a time in the cause of peace and growth? Many
devoutly hoped it. Many devoutly espoused the cause of compromise
merely for the sake of gaining time. As neither of the great
political parties of the day filled its ranks from either section,
so in both sections there were many who espoused, as many who
denied, the right of men to own slaves. We speak of slavery as the
one great question of that day. It was not and never has been the
greatest. The question of democracy--that was even then, and it is
now, the greatest question.

Here on the deck of the steamer at the little city of Pittsburg,
then gateway of the West, there appeared men of purposes and
beliefs as mixed as this mixed country from which they came. Some
were pushing out into what now is known as Kansas, others going to
take up lands in Missouri. Some were to pass south to the slave
country, others north to the free lands; men of all sorts and
conditions, many men, of many minds, that was true, and all
hurrying into new lands, new problems, new dangers, new remedies.
It was a great and splendid day, a great and vital time, that
threshold-time, when our western traffic increased so rapidly and
assuredly that steamers scarcely could be built rapidly enough to
accommodate it, and the young rails leaped westward at a speed
before then unknown in the world.

Carried somehow, somewhither, for some reason, on these surging
floods, were these travelers, of errand not wholly obvious to their
fellows, yet of such sort as to call into query alike the nature of
their errand and their own relations. It is easily earned
repetition to state that Josephine St. Auban's was a presence not
to be concealed. Even such a boat as the Mount Vernon offered a
total deck space so cramped as to leave secrecy or privacy well out
of the question, even had the motley and democratic assemblage of
passengers been disposed to accord either. Yet