By a miserable juggle, worthy of the frequenters of the
gambling-house or the race-course, the people of Kansas have been
nominally allowed to decide the question of Slavery, and that
permission, according to Mr. Buchanan, fulfils and completes all that
he ever meant, or his associates ever meant, by the promise of
popular sovereignty!
Now this may be all that the President and his party ever meant by
that phrase, but it is not all that their words expressed or the
country expected. In the course of the last three or four years, and
by a series of high-handed measures, the established principles of
the Federal Government, in regard to its management of the
Territories,--principles sanctioned by every administration from
Washington's down to Fillmore's,--have been overruled for the sake
of a new doctrine, which goes by the name of Popular Sovereignty.
The most sacred and binding compacts of former years were annulled
to make way for it; and the judicial department of the government
was violently hauled from its sacred retreat, into the political
arena, to give a gratuitous _coup-de-grace_ to the old opinions and
the apparent sanction of law to the new dogma, so that Popular
Sovereignty might reign triumphant in the Territories. At the
convention of the party which nominated Mr. Buchanan as a candidate
for his present office,--"a celebrated occasion," as he calls it,--
the members affirmed in the most emphatic manner the right of the
people of all the Territories, including Kansas, to form their own
Constitutions as they pleased, under the single condition that it
should be republican.
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