The Northern Daily Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-12-16 00:00:00

TWO MEN BURIED ALIVE.

A sad catastrophe, attended with the loss of two lives, and
the destruction of much property, took place in a coalpit in
course of sinking, the property of Messrs. Barnes, coalmasters,
of Grassmore, near Chesterfield. Messrs. Barnes commenced
tha erection of works in April last, for winnowing the coal.—
An air shaft, 81t. 2in. in diameter when bricked, was being
sunk as a trial shaft, to ascertain the depth of the coal, and
three men were employed in the pit. These three men were
Henry Berrisford, an experienced mason and bricklayer.
Joseph Barker, and Wm. Fletcher, colliers, who were acting in
the capacity of labourers to Berrisford. As the pit was
being sunk, the sides were lined with oak corbs and
sheeting, firmly bolted together by iron bolts, to prevent
any slipping of the earth as they proceeded uownwarde.—
After the pit had been thus sunk 17 yards deep, the sinking
was ceased, and the men commenced at the bottom of the pit
lining the shaft with three rings of brickwork set in barrow
lime, and worked upwards towards the surface. 0,1 Friday
they h ,d bricked up seven yards high, and were working on a
scaffold in the pit, and about twenty minutes to six Berrisford
went out of the pit to get his tea, leaving two men, Barker and
Fletcher, clearing away some dirt which had fallen down the
pit, and in a short time afterwards he came to the mouth of the
pit and shouted to the men, " How are you going on there ?"
One of the men replied, " Oh, all tight, we shall be ready for
you in a few minutes." Berrisford went away, and be had not
left the pit mouth above two minutes before there was a loud
noise, occasioned by the breaking of the timber which lined
the sides of the pit, and a great mass of earth fell in and buried
both the men. They perceived the earth falling, and both
rushed into the bucket, and called out to be drawn up to the
pit mouth. The winders commenced to remove the bucket,
but the fallen earth had imbedded it so firmly in the soil that
it could not be raised upwards. There was a 9in pump which
ran down the side of the shaft to pump the water from several
powerful springs, and it was worked by a 12-horse engine,
which lifted water from the pit at the rate of about 130
gallons per minute. This pump was forced by the earth
from the side to the centre of the pit, and being thus put out
of its perpendicular, it stopped working, and the engine ceased.
An alarm was immediately given, but it being dark, no steps
could be taken to reach the unfortunate men over whom about
twenty tons of earth had fallen. Fletcher, one of the buried_
men, called out several times " Holloa !" and he was answered.
He cried out, " Can you get me out ?" his words being dis-
tinctly heard. The men answered they would do their best.
He again called out, " Is the engine and pumps at work ?"
The
men told him they were not, and that the
Pump Was broken.
He then said, " If the pumps are not at work I shall be
drowned." The manager, John Brailsfold, then forced a road
through a portion of the earth and down underneath the
ecaffording by a long pole, and he attached a lighted candle at
the end and put it down the pit, and asked t Fie ehe rif be
could see it. Fletcher said " No," and this was the last
which they had heard the poor fellow utter. Mr. Bromley,
the chief manager, was down the pit
word
pit on the morning of the
accident, and he saw
no defects in the earthwork or its
supporters. The cause of the accident is attributed to the
natural neehness or soft state of the ground, which had been
increased by the heavy tains which succeeded the late frost and
thaw. The 10S13 to Mews. Barnes, the proprietors of the
works, will be very great. All the machinery employed at
the works was new, and of the best construction.

MR. STURGEON AT THE SURREY MUSIC HALL,— CU
Sunday morning Mr. Spurgeon delivered the last of the
four sermons he had been announced to preach in this hall.
The congregation was greater than on any cf the previous
occasions, probably exceeding 8,000. The greatest order
and decorum were observed during the whole of the service.
The rev. gentleman selected as his text, Hebrews 11 chap.
6 verse. " But without faith it is impossible to 'please
God."

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE.

[The following appeared in our Second Edition, published
Yesterday morning at six o'clock :—]

llow citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives.

The Constitution requires that the President shall,
from time to time, not only recommend to the considera-
tion of Congress, such measures as he may judge
necessary and expedient, but also that he shall give
information to them of the state of the Union. To do
this fully involves exposition of all matters in the actual
conditba of the country, domestic :or or foreign, which

essentially concern the general welfare.
While performing his constitutional duty in this
tespett, the President does not speak merely to express
tiersonal convictions, but as the executive minister of the
'government, enabled by his position, and called by his
'official obligations, to scan with an impartial eye the
interests of the whole, and of every part of the United

Of the condition of the domestic interests of the Union,
its agriculture, mines, manufactures, navigation and
commerce, it is necessary only to say that the internal
prosperity of the country, its continuous and steady ad-
vancement in wealth and• population, and in private as
well as public well being, attest the wisdom of our insti •
tutlons, and the predominant spirit of intelligence and
patriotism, which, notwithstanding occasional irregulari-
ties of opinion or action, resulting from popular freedom,
hat distinguished and characterised the people of
A therica.

' In'the brief interval between the termination of the
last, and the commencement of the present session of
Congress, the public mind has b'en occupied with the
care of selecting, for another constitutional term, the
President and the Vice President of the United States.
The determination of the persons who are of right, or
contingently, to preside over the administration of the
government, is, under our system, committed to the
States and the people. We appeal to them, by their
voice, pronounced in the forms of law, to call whomsoever
they will to the high post of Chief Magistrate.
And thus it is that as the Senators represent the
respective States of the Union, and the members of the
House of Representatives the several constituencies of
each State, so the President represents the aggregate
population of the United States. Their election of him
is the explicit and solemn act of the tole sovereign
authority of the Union.
It is impossibleto misapprehend the great principles,
which, by their recent political action, the people of the
United States have sanctioned and announced.
They have asserted the constitutional equality of each
and all of the States of the Union as States ; they have
affirmed the constitutional equality of each and all of
the citizens of the United States as citizens, whatever
their religion, whatever their birth, or their residence ;
they have maintained the inviolability of the constitu-
tional rights of the different sections of the Union ; and
they have proclaimed their devoted and unalterable
attachment to the Union and to the-constitution, as
objects of interest superior to all subjects of local or
sectional controversy, as the safeguard of the rights of
all, as the spirit and essence of the liberty, peace, and
greatness of the Republic.
In doing this, they have, at the same time, emphatically
condemned the. idea of organising in the United States
mere geographical parties ; of marshalling in hostile
array, towards each other, the different parts of the
country, north or south, east or west.
Schemes of this nature fraught with incalculable
mischief, and which the considerate sense of the people
has rejected, could have had countenance in no part of
the country, had they not been disguised by suggestions
plausible in appearance, acting upon an excited state
of the public mind, induced by causes temporary in
their character, and it is to be hoped transient in their
influence.

Perfect liberty of association for political objects, and
the wildest scope of discussion, are the received and
ordinary conditions of government in our country.
Our institutions, framed in the spirit of confidence in
the intelligence and integrity of the people, do not for-
bid citizens, either individually or associated, to attack,
by writing, speech, or any other methods short of
physical force, the constitution and the very existence of
the Union.

Under the shelter of this great liberty, and protected
by the laws and usages of the government they assail,
associations have been formed, in some of the States, of
individuals, who, pretending to seek only to prevent the
spread of the institution of slavery into the present or
future inchoate States of the Union, are really inflamed
with a desire to change the domestic institutions of
existing States.
To accomplish their objects, they dedicate themselves
to the odious task of deprecating the government
organisation which stands in their way, and of calumni-
ating with indiscriminate invective, not only the citizens
of particular States, with those laws they find fault, but
all others of their fellow citizens throughout the country,
who- do not participate with them in their assaults upon
the Constitution, framed and atlop..ed by our fathers, and
claiming for the privileges it has secured, and the

blessings it has conferred, the steady support and
grateful reverence of their children.
They seek an object which they well know to be a
revolutionary one. They are perfectly aware that the
change in the relative condition of the white and black
races in the slaveholding States, which they would pro-
mote, is beyond their lawful authority ; that to them it
is a foreign object ; that it cannot be effected by any
peaceful instrumentality of theirs ; that for them, and
the States of which they are citizens, the only path to its
accomplishment is through burning cities, and ravaged
fields, and slaughtered populations, and all there is most
terrible in foreign, complicated with civil and servile
war ; and that the first step in the attempt is the forcible
disruption of a country embracing in its broad bosom a
degree of liberty, and an amount of individual and public
prosperity, to which there is no parallel in history,
'and substituting in its place hostile governments, driven
at once and inevitably into mutual devastation and
fratricidal carnage, transforming the now peaceful and
felicitous brotherhood into a vast permanent camp of
armed men like the rival monarchies of Europe and Asia.
Well knowing that such, and such .only, are the means
and the consequences of their plans and purposes, they
endeavour to prepare the people of the United States for
civil war by doing everything in their power to deprive the
constitution and the laws of moral authority, and to under-
mine the fabric of the Union by appeals to passion and
sectional prejudice, by indoctrinating its people with re-
ciprocal hatred, and by educating them to stand face to face
as enemies, rather than shoulder to shoulder as frie.nds.
it is by the agency of such unwarrantable interference,
foreign and domestic, that the minds of many, otherwise
good citizens, have been so inflamed into the passionate
condemnation of the domestic institutions of the southern
states, as at length to pass insensibly in almost equally pas.
sionate hesti'ity to their fellow citizens of those states, and
thus finally to fall into temporary fellowship with the avowed
and active enemies of the constitution. Ardently attached
to liberty in the abstract, they do not stop to consider prac-
tically how the objects they would obtain can be accom-
plished, nor to reflect that, even if the evil were so great as
they deem it, they have no remedy to apply, aid that it can
be only aggravated by their violence and unconstitutional
action.

A qtustion which is one of the most difficult of all the
problems of social institution, poli'ical economy and states_
manship, they treat with unreasoning intemperance of
thought and language. Extremes beget extremes. Violent
attack from the north finds inevitable consequence in the
growth of a spirit of angry defiance at the south. Thus in
the progress of event's we had reached that consummation,
which the voice of the people has now so pointedly rebuked
of the attempt of a portion of the States, by a sectional
organisation and movement, to usurp the control of the
government of the United States.
I confidently believe that the great body of those who in-
considerately took this fatal step, are sincerely attached to the
constitution and the union. They would, upon deliberation,
shrink with unaffected horror from any conscious act of
disunion or civil war. But they have entered into a path
which leads nowhere unless it be to civil war and disunion,
and which hag no other possible outlet.

They have proceeded thus far in that direction in conse-
quence of the successive stages of thEir progress having
consisted of a series of secondary issues, each of which
professed to be confined within constitutional and peaceful
lirni;s, but which uttempted indirectly_ what few men were
willing to do directly, that is, to act aggressively against the
constitution,' rights of nearly one-half of the thirty-one
States.

In the long series of acts of indirect aggression, the first
was the streauous agitation, by
citizens of the northern
States, in Congress and out of it, of the question of negro
emancipation in the southern States.
. The second step in this path of evil consisted of acts of
the people of the northern States, and in several instances
of their governments, aimed to ,facilitate the escape of
persons held to service in the southern States, and to pre-
vent their extradition when reclaimed according to law and
in virtue of express provisions of the Constitution.
T., promote this object legistative enactments and other
means were adopted to take away or defeat rights which
the constitution solemnly gauranteed. in order to milli!),
the then existing act of Congress concerning the extraui-
tiop of fugitives from service, laws were enacted in many
States, forbidding their officers, under the severest penalties,

to participate in the execution of any act of Congress
whatever. - _ _
Jn,this_way that ..ystem of harmonious co-operation be-
tween the authorities of the Uilited States 'and of the several
States, for the maintenance of „their common, institutions,
which existed in the e irly._years of the Republic, was de-
stroyed; conflicts of jurisdiction came to be frequent ; and
Congress found itself to be conipelled, for the suppott of the
Constitu ion, and the ,indication of its power, to autharize
the appointment of new officers charged withthe execution
Of its acts, as it they and the officers bf the. States were the
ministers respectiliely, of foreign governments in a state of
mutual, hostility, rather ,tban fellow magistrates of. a dont-
nion country, peacefully subsisting under the protection of
one well-cons'itutei Union. Thus here also, aggression
was followed by reaction; and the attacks upon the Con-
stitution at this point did but serve to raise up new barriers
for its defence and security.
The third stage of this unhappy sectional controversy
was in connection with the 'organisation of territorial
goiernments, and the admission of new States • into the
Union. When it was -proposel to admit the State of
Maine, by separation of territory from that of Massa.-
chusetts, and the State of Missouri formed a portion of
the territory ceded by France to the Uni•ed States, repre-
sentatives in Congress objected to the admission of the
latter, unless with conditions suited to particular views of
public policy.
The imposition of such a condition was successfully
resisted. But, at the same period, the question was pre-
sented of imposing restrictions upon the residue of the
territory ceded by France. That question was; for the time,
disposed of by the adoption of a. ge)graphical line of

limitation.
In this connection it should not be forgot en that France,
of her own accord resolved,' for considerations of the most
far sighted sagacity, to ce le Louisiana to the United States,
and that accession was accepted by the United States, the
latter expressly engaged that " the inhabitants of the ceded
territory shall be incorporated in the union of the United
States, and admitted as soon as possible, according to the
principles of the federal constitution, to the enjoyment of
all the rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the
United States ; and in the meantime they shall be main
tained in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property, and
the religion which they profees"—that is to say, while it
remains in a territorial condition, its inhabitants are mains
tained and protected i❑ the free enjoyment of their liberty
and property, with a right then to pass into the condition
of States on a footing of perfect equality with the original
States.- - '
. The enactment which established restrictive geographical
line, was acquiesced in rather than approved of by the
States of the Union. It stood on the statute book, however,
for a number of years ; and the people of the respective
States acquiesced in the re-enactment of the principle as
applied to the State• of Texas; end it was proposed to
acquiesce in its further application to the territory acquired
by the United States from. Mexico.

But this position was suceessfully resisted by the repre-
sentatives from the northern States, who, regardless of the
statute line, insisted upon applying restriction to die new
territory generally, whether lying north or south of it,
Thereby repealing it as a legislative compromise, and, on
the part of the North, persistently violating the compact;
if compact there was. _ _

Thereupon this enactment ceased to have binding virtue
in any sense. whether as respects the North or the South ; and
so in effect it was treated on the occasion of the admission
of the State of California, and the organization of the
Territories of New Mexico, Utah, and Washington.
Such was the state of this question, when ' the time
arrived for the organization of the Territories of Kansas and
Nebraska. In the progress of constitutional inquiry and
reflection, it had now at length come to be seen elearly that
Congress does not possess constitutional power to impose
restrictions of this character up3n any present or future
State of the Union. In a long series of decisions, on the
fullest argument, and after the most deliberate oonsidera-
tion, the Supreme Court of the United States had finally
determined this point, in every form under which the
question could arise, whether as affecting public or private
rights—in question of the public domain, of religion, of
navigation, and of servitude.
The several States of the Union are, by force of the
Constitution, co-equal in domestic legislative power.
Congress cannot change a law of domestic relation in the
State of Maine, no more can it in the State of Missouri.
Any statute which proposes to do this is a mere nullity—
it takes aivay no right, it confers none. If it remains on
the statute book unrepealed, it remains there only as a
monument of error, and a beacon of warning to the legis-
lator and the statesmen. To repeal it will be only to
remove imperfection from the statutes, without affecting
either in the sense of permission or of prohibition, the
action of the States, or of thnir citizens. _ _

Still, when the nominal restriction of this nature, already
a dead letter in law, was in terms repealed by the last
Congress, in a clause of the act organising the Territories
of Kansas and Nebraska, that repeal was made the .occa-
sion of a wide-spread and dangerous agitation.
It was alleged that the original enactment being a
compact of perpetual moral obligation, its repeal consti-
tuted, an odious breach of faith. _ _

An art of Congress, while it remains unrepealed, more
especially if it be constitutionally valid iu the judgment of
those public functionaries whose duty it is to pronounce on
that point, is undoubtedly binding on the conscience of

each good citizen of the Republic.- But in what sense can
it be asserted that the enactment in question was invested
with perpetuity and entitled to the respect of a solemn
compact ? Between-whom was the compact ? No distinct

contending powers of the government, no separate sections
of the Union, treating as such, entered into treaty stipula-
tions on the subject.

It was a mere clause of an act of Congress, and like any
other controverted matter of legislation, received its final
shape and was passed by cotnpromise of the conflicting
opinions or sentiments of the members of Congress. But
if it had moral authority over men's consciences, to wham
did this authority attach? Not to those of the North,
who had repeatedly, refused to confirm it by extension,
and who had zealously striven to establish other and in.
compatible regulations upon the subject. And if, as it
thus appears, the supposed compact had no obligatory
force as to the North, of courze it could not have had any
as to the South, for all such compacts must be mutual and
of reciprocal obligation.
It has not unfrequently happened that lawgivers, with
undue estimation of the value of the law they give, or in
the view of imparting to it peculiar strength, make it per-
petual in terms; but they cannot, thus bind the con,cience,
the judgment, and the will of those who may succeed
them, invested with similar responsibilities, and clothed
with equal authority. More careful investigation may
prove the law to be unsound in principle. Experience
may show it to be imperfect in detail and impracticable in
execution. And then both reason and right combine not
merely to justify but to require its repeal.
The Constitution, supreme as it is over all the depart-
ments of the government, legislative, executive, and
judicial, is open to amendment by its very terms ; and
Congress or the States may, in_ their discretion, propose
amendment to it, solemn compact though it in truth is
between the sovereign States of the Union. In the present
instance, a political enactment, which had ceased to have
legal power or authority of any kind, was repealed.

The position assumed, that Congress had no moral
right to• enact such repeal, was strange enough, and sin-
gularly so in view of the fact that the argument came
from those who openly refused obedience to existing laws
of the land, having the same popular designation and
quality as compromise acts—nay, more, who unequivocally
disregarded andcondemned the most positive and obligatory
injunctions of the Constitution itself, and sought, by every
means within their reach, to deprive a portion of their
fellow.citizens of the equal enjoyment of those rights and
privileges guaranteed alike to all by the fundamental cJm
pact of our Union.

This argument against the repeal of the statute line in
question, was accompanied by another of congenial cha-
racter, and equally with the former destitute of founda-
tion in reason and truth. It was imputed that the mea-
sure originated in the conception of extending the limits
of slave labour beyond those previously assigned to it,
and that such was its natural as well as intended effect ;
and these baseless assumptions were made, in the northern
States, the ground of unceasing assault upon constitu-
tional right.

The repeal'in terms of a statue, which was already ob-
solete, and also null for unconstitutionality, could have no
influence to obstruct or to promote the propagation of
conflicting views of political or social institution. When
the act organising the territories of Kansas and Nebraska
was passed, the inherent effect upon that portion of the
put lie domain thus opened to legal settlement was to
admit settlers from all the States of the Union alike, each
with his convictions of public policy and private interest,
there to found in their discretion, sutject to such limita-
tions as the Constitution and acts of Congress might pre
scribe, new States, hereafter to be admitted into the
Union.

It wes a free field, open alike to all, whether the statute
line of assumed restriction were repealed or not. That
repeal did not open to free competition of the diverse
opinions and domestic institutions a field, which, without
such repeal, would have been closed against them ; it
found that field of competition already opened, in fact and
in law. All the repeal did was to relieve the statute
book of an objectionable enactment, unconstitutional in
effect, and injurious in terms to a large portion of the
States.

Is it the fact, that, in all the unsettled regions of the
United States, if emigration be left free to act in this re-
spect for itself, without legal prohibitions on either side,
slave labour will spontaneously go everywhere, in prefer-
ence to free labour? It is the fact that the peculiar
domestic institutions of the Southern States possess rela-
tively so much of vigour, that, wheresoever an avenue is
freely open to all the world, they will penetrate to the
exclusion of those of the Northern States.

It is the fact that the former enjoy, compared with the
latter, such irresistibly superior vitality, independent of
climate, soil, and all other accidental circumstances, so as
to be able to produce the supposed result, in spite of the
assumed moral and natural obstacles to its accomplish-

ment, and of the more numerous population of the
Northern States?
"The argument of those who alvocate the enactment Of
new laws of restriction, and condemn the repeal of old
oues, in effect avers that. their particular views of govern-
ment have no self-extending or self-sustaining power of
their own, and will go nowhere unless forced by act of
Congress. And if Congress, do but pause for a moment
in the policy of stern coercion ; if -it venture to try the
experiment of leaving men to judge for themselves what
institutions will best suit them ; if it be not strained up
to perpetnal legislative exertion on this point; if Congress
proceed ,thus to act in the very spirit of liberty, it is at
once charged with aiming to extend slave labour into all
the new, Territories of the United States, . •
Of course, these imputations on the intentions of Con-
gress in this respect, conceived as they were in prejudice,

and disseminated in passion, are utterly destitute of any
justification in the nature of thing's., and contrary to all
the fundamental 'clOctritieg and, kinclplek of civil' liberty
and self-government.
While, therefore, in general, the people of the Northern
States have never at any time arrogated for the federal
government the power to interfere directly with the
domestic condition of persons in the Southern States, but
on the contrary have disavowvl all- such intentions, and
have shrunk from conspicuous affiliation with those, few
who pursue their fanatical objects avowedly through the
contemplated means of revolutionary. change of the
government, and with acceptance of the necessary conse-
quences—a civil and servile war—yet many-citizens have
suffered themselves to be drawn into one

vanescent
poli-
tical issue of agitation after another, appertainlng to the
same set of opinions, and which subsided as rapidly as
they arose when it came to be seen, as It uniformly did,
that they were incompatible with the compacts of the
Constitution and the existence of the Union.
Thus, when the acts of some, of the States to nullify the
existing extradition law imposed, upon Congress the duty
of passing a new one, the country was invited by agitators
to enter into party organisation for its repeal ; but that
agitation speedily ceased by reason of the impracticability
of its object- So, when'the statute restrictions upon the
institutions of new' States, by a geographical line, had
been repealed, the country was urged to demand its re-
storation, and that project also died almost with its birth.
Then followed the cry of alarm from the North against
imputed Southern/ encroachments ; which cry sprang in
reality from the spirit of revolutionary attack on the
domestic institutions of the South, and, after a troubled
existence of a few mouths, has been rebuked by the voice
of a. patriotic people.
• Of this lag. agitation, one lamentable feature was, that it
Was carried on at the immediate expense of the peace and
happiness of the Territory of Kansas. That was made
the battlefield; not so much of opposing • factions or in-
terests within itself, as of the conflicting passions of the
Whole people of the United States. Revolutionary
disorder in Kansas had its origin in projects of interven
tion, deliberately arranged by certain members of that
Congress; which enacted the law for the organisation of
the Territory. And when propagandist colonisation of
Kansas had thus been undertaken in one section of the
Union, for the systematic promotion of its peculiar views
of policy, there ensued, as a matter of course, a counter-
action with opposite views; in other sections of the Union.
In consequence of these and other incidents, many acts
of disorder it is undeniable, have been perpetrated in
Kansas, to the-occasional interruption, rather than the
permanent suspension of regular government. Aggressive
and most reprehensible disturbances into the territory
were undertaken, both in the North and the South, and
entered on its northern border by way of lowa, as well as
on the eastern by way of Missouri; and there has existed
within it a state of insurrection against the constituted
authorities, not without countenance from inconsiderate
persons in each of the great sections of the Union. But
the difficulties of the territory have been extravagantly
exaggerated for the purposes of political agitation else-
where, "

The nnmber and gravity of the acts of violence have
been magnified partly by statements entirely untrue, and
partly by reiterated accounts of the same rumours or
facts. Thus the territory has been seemingly filled with
extreme violence, when the whole amount of such acts
has not been greater than what occasionally passes before
us in single cities to the regret of all good citizens, but
without being regarded as of general or permanent politi-
cal consequence.

Imputed irregularities in the elections had in Kansas,
like occasional irregularities of the same desci iption in
the states, were beyond the sphere of the action of the
Executive. But incidents of actual violence or of organised
obstruction of law, pertinaciously renewed from time to
time, have been met as they occurred, by such means as
were available and as the circumstances required ; and
nothing of this character now remains to affect the general
peace of the Union.

The attempt of a part of the inhabitants of the Territory
to erect a revolutionary government, though sedulously
encouraged and supplied with pecuniary aid from active
agents of disorder in some of the States, has completely
failed. Bodies of armed men, foreign to the Territory,
have been prevented from entering, or compelled to leave
it. Predatory bands, engaged in acts of rapine, under
cover of the existing political disturbances, have been
arrested or dispersed; and every well disposed person is
now enabled once more to devote himself in peace to the
pursuits of prosperous industry, for the prosecution of
which he undertook to participate in the settlement of the
Territory.

It affords me unmingled satisfaction thus to announce
the peaceful condition of things in Kansas, especially
considering the means to 'which it was necessary to have

employment o

for the attainment of the end, namely, the
the military force of the United
The withdrawal of that force from its proper
duty of defending the country against foreign foes or the
sayagelof the frontier, to employ it for the suppression
of domestic insurrection, is, when the exigency occurs, a
matter of the Most earnest solicitude.

On this occasion of imperative necessity it has been done
with the best results, and my satisfaction in the atta'n-
ment of such results by such means is greatly enhanced
by the consideration that, through the wisdom and energy
of the present Executive of Kansas, and the prudence,
firmness, and vigilance of the officers on duty there, tran-
quillity has been restored without one drop of blood having
been shed in its accomplishment by the forces of the
United States. .

The restoration of comparative tranquility in that
territory furnishes the means of observin, calmly, and
appreciating at their just value, the events which have
occurred there, and the discussions of which the govern
ment of the territory has been the subject.
e perceive that controversy concerning its future
dometic institutions was inevitable—that no human pru-
dence, no form of legislation, no wisdom on the part of the
Congress could have prevented this.
It is idle to suppose that the particular provisions of
their organic law were the cause of agitation. Those
provisions were but the occasion, or the pretext of an
agitation, which was inherent in the nature of things.
Congress legislated upon the subject in such terms as
were most consonant with the principle of popular sove
reignty which underlies our government. It could not
have legislated otherwise without doing violence to another
great principle of our institutions, the imperscriptible
right of equality of the several States.
We perceive, also, that sectional interests and party
passions, have been the great impediment to the salutary
operation of the organic principles adopted, and the chief
cause of the successive disturbances in Kansas. The
assumption that, because in the organization of the
Territories of Nebraska and Kansas, Congress abstained
from imposing restraints upon them to which certain
other Territories had been subject, therefore disorders
occurred in the latter Territory, is emphatically contra-
dicted by the fact that none have occurred in the former.
These disorders were not the consequence, in Kansas, of
the freedom of self-government conceded to that Territory
by Congress, but of unjust interference on the part of
persons not inhabitants of the Territory. Such inter-
ference wherever it has exhibited itself, by acts of insur-
rectionary character, or of obstruction to processes of law,
has been repelled or suppressed, by all the means which
the Constitution and the laws place in the hands of the
Executive.

In those parts of the United States where, by reason of
the inflamed state of the public mind, false rumours and
misrepresentations have the greatest currency, it has been
assumed that it was the duty of the Executive not only to
suppress insurrectionary movements in Kansas, but also
to see to the regularity of local elections. It needs little
argument to show that the President has no such power.
All government in the United States rests substantially
upon popular election. The freedom of elections is liable
to be impaired by the intrusion of unlawful votes, or the
exclusion of lawful ones, by, improper influences, by
violence, or by fraud. But the people of the United
States are themselves the all-sufficient guardians of their
own rights, and to suppose that they will not remedy, in,
due season, any such incidents of civil freedom, is to
suppose them to have ceased to be capable of self-
government.
The President of the United States has not power to
interpose in elections, to see to their freedom, to canvass
their votes, or to pass upon their legality in the Territo-
ries any more than in the States. If he had such power
the government might be republican in form, but it would
be a monarchy in fact ; and if he had undertaken to
exercise it in the case of Kansas. he would have been
justly-subject to charge a of usurpation. and of violation of
the clearest rights of the people of the United States.
Unwise laws, equally with irregularities at elections
are, in periods of great excitement, the occasional inci-
dents of even the freest and best political institutions.
But all experience demonstrates that in a country like
ours, where the right of seliconstitution exists in its coin-
pletest form, the attempt to remedy unwise legislation by
a resort to revolution, is totally out of place; inasmuch
as existing legal institutions afford-' more prompt and effi-
cacious means for the redress of wrong.

I confidently trust that now, when the peaceful condi-
tion of Kans.'s affords opportunity. for calm reflection and
wise legislation, either the legislative assembly of the ter-
ritory, or Congress, will see that no act shall remain on
its statute book violative of the provisions of the Consti—
tution, or subversive of the great objects for which that,
was crdained and established, and will take all other
necessary steps to assure to its inhabitants the enjoyment,
without obstruction or abridgment, of all the constitutional
rights, privileges, and immunities of citizens of the
United States, as contemplated by the organic law of the
territory.
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