The Sun.
London, England, 1858-12-20 00:00:00

AMERICA.

THE- PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE.
LIVERVOOL,: SUNDAY.
The Royal Mail steam-ship Africa, Captain
Shannon, arrived in the Mersey a little before eight
this morning, having sailed from New York on-the
Bth inst. She brings 66 passengers and 187,000
dols. in specie. The Africa was off Point Lynas at
half-past ten last night, but waited outside for
water.

Congress met on the Gth inst., and, having been
duly organised, the President's Message was handed
in as follows

THE MESSAGE.
" Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and House of
Representatives.
" When we compare the condition of the coun-
try at the present day with what it was one year
ago at the meeting of Congress, NO have much rea-
son for-gratitude to that Almighty Providence
which has never failed to interpose for our relief at
the most critical period of our history. One year
ago, the sectional strife between the North and the
South, on the dangerous subject of slavery, had
again become so intense as to threaten the peace
and perpetuity of the confederacy. The applica-

tion for the admission of Kansas as a state into the
Union fostered this unhappy agitation, and brought
the whole subject once more before Congress. It
was the desire of every patriot that such measures
of legislation might be adopted as would remove
the excitement from the states, and confine it to
the territory, where it legitimately belonged.
Much has been done, I am happy to say, towards
the accomplishment of this object during the last
session of Congress.
THE KANSAS QUESTION.
" The Supreme Court of the United States had
previously decided that all American citizens have
an equal right to take into the territories whatever
is held as property under the laws of any of the
states, and to hold such property there under the
guardianship of the federal constitution, so long as
the territorial condition shall remain.
" This is now a well-established position, and the
proceedings of the last session were alone wanting
to give it practical effect. The principle has been
recognised, in some form or other, by an almost
unanimous vote of both houses of Congress, that a
territory has a right to come into the Union either
as a free or a slave state, according to the will of a
majority of its people. The just equality of all the
states has thus been vindicated, and a fruitful
source of dangerous dissension among them has been
removed.

" Whilst such has been the beneficial tendency
of your legislative proceedings outside of Kansas,
their influence has been nowhere so happy as within
that territory itself. Left to manage and control
its,,oyn affairs in its own way, without the pressure
of external influence, the revolutionary Topeka
organisation, and all resistance to the territorial
government established by Congress, have been
finally abandoned. As a natural consequence, that
fine territory now appears to be tranquil and pro-
sperous, and is attracting increasing thousands of
immigrants to make it their happy home.
" The past unfortunate experience of Kansas has
enforced the lesson so often already taught, that
resistance to lawful authority, under our form of
government, cannot fail in the end to prove disas-
trous to its authors. Had the people of the terri-
tory yielded obedience to the laws enacted by their
legislature it wo*ld at the present moment have
contained a large additional population of indus-
trious 'and enterpising citizens, who have been
deterred from entering its borders by the existence
of civil strife and organised rebellion.
" It was the resistance to rightful authority, and
the persevering attempts to establish a revolu-
tionary government under the Topeka constitution,
which caused the people of Kansas to commit the
grave error of refusing to vote for delegates to the
convention to frame a constitution under a law not
denied to be fair and just in its provisions. This
refusal to vote has been the prolific source of all the
evils which have followed. In their hostility to the
territorial government they disregarded the prin-
ciple, absolutely essential to the working of our
form of government, that a majority of those who
voter--not the majority' who remain at home, from
whatever cause—must decide the result of an elec-
tion. For this reason, seeking to take advantage
of their own error, they denied the authority of the
convention thus elected to frame a constitution.
! ," The convention, notwithstanding, proceeded to
adopt a constitution unexceptionable in its general
features, and providing for the submission of the
slavery question to a vote of the people, which, in
my opinion,they were bound to do milder the Kansas
and Nebraska Act. This was the all-important
question which had alone convulsed the territory,
and yet the opponents of the lawful government, per-
sisting in their first error, refrained from exercising
their right to vtoe, and preferred that slavery
should continue rather than surrender their revolu-
tionary Topeka organisation.
" A wiser and better spirit seemed to prevail
before the first Monday of January last, when an
election was held under the constitution. A ma-
jority of the people then voted for a governor and
other state officers, for a member of. Congress and
members of the state legislature. This election was
warmly contested by the two political parties in
Kansas, and a greater vote was polled than at any
previous election. A large majority of the mem-
bers of the legislature elect belonged to that party
which had previously refused to vote. The anti-
slavery party were thus placed in the ascendant,
and the political power of the state was in their
oWn hands. Had Congress admitted Kansas into
the Union under the Lecompton constitution, the
legisLiaze might, at its very first have
submitted the question to a vote of the people,
whether they would or would not have a conven-
tion to amend their constitution, either on the
slavery or any other question, and have adopted all
necessary means for giving speedy effect to the will
of the majority. Thus the Kansas question would
have been immediately and finally settled.
" Under these circumstances I submit to Congress
the constitution thus framed, with all the officers
already elected necessary to put the state govern-
ment into operation, accompanied by a strong ie=
commendation in favour of the admission of Kansas
as a state. In the course of my long public life I
have never performed any official act which, in the
retrospect, has afforded me more heartfelt satisfac-
:ion. Its admission could have inflicted no possible
injury on any human being, whilst it would, within
brief period, have restored peace to Kansas and
aarmony to the Union. In that event the slavery
question would ere this have been finally settled,
according to the legally expressed will of a ma-
jority of the voters, and popular sovereignty would
thus have been vindicated in a constitutional
manner.
"-With my deep convictions of duty I' could have
pursued no other course. It is true that as an in-
dividual I had expressed an opinion, both before
and during the session of the convention, in favour
of submitting the remaining clauses of the consti-
tution, as well as' that concerning slavery, to the
people. But acting in an official character, neither
myself nor any human, authority had a power to
rejudgc the proceedings of the convention, and
declare the constitution *hich it had framed to be
a nullity. To have done this would have been a
violation of the Kansas and Nebraska Act, which
left the people of the territory perfectly free to
form and regulate their domestic institutions in
their own way, subject only to the constitution of
the United States.' It would equally have violated
the great principle of popular sovereignty, the
foundation of our institutions, to deprive the people of
the power, and if they thought proper to exercise it, of
confiding to delegates elected by themselves the
trust of framing a constitution without requiring
them to subject their constituents to the trouble,
expense, and delay of a second election. It would
have been in opposition to many precedents in our
history, commexciug in the very best age of the
republic, of the admission of territories as states
into the Union without a vote of the people approv-
ing the constitution.
" It is to be lamented that a question so insigni-
ficant when viewed in its practical effects on the