Napoleon, stained with the blood of millions of his fellow-beings, but Washington, who never took life but in the cause of his country, of liberty and of humanity. Washington was a true soldier. He took up arms, not to elevate himself, but to defend the right, to assert the great principle of English liberty inherited as a birthright from those who landed on Plymouth rock. That accomplished, he asked not to be made king or emperor, but was content with the applause and gratitude of his countrymen. Before such fame as his, the lustre of kings and emperors, and the greatest of conquerors, shall fade and grow dim, as the farthing rushlight is lost in the bright meridian blaze of the king of day.

15

KANSAS.

WHAT dreadful images of murder, robbery, arson and border ruffianism are called up by the word Kansas. The ballot-box violated and its sanctity overthrown, presses thrown into the river, settlers flying for their lives, Sharp's rifles and Unites States' troops make up the swelling scene in this new drama, enacted on the borders of civilization, where, but a year or two since, the Indians and the buffaloes were the undisputed possessors of the soil. Where could such a spectacle be exhibited but in this land of emigration and of new settlements? In a year or two more the troubles in Kansas will be over, and a new State spring into life, destined, in a few years more, to rival in population some of the oldest States in the Union, and to send out, in its turn, a new swarm of emigrants towards the Rocky Mountains, and far beyond them to the shores of the Pacific. Thus it is that the star of empire takes its westward course. The waves of population follow hard upon each other until they have flooded the whole continent, from ocean to ocean.

Who would venture to predict the future of Kansas? Geographically, it is about the centre of what is to be the United States. The time may come, unless we become a prey to dissension and discord, the grave of the old republics, when the seat of government will be transferred from Washington to Lawrence, and a splendid capitol rise upon the log huts of the present city. Railroads, which now connect it with the eastern shore, will then stretch across the mountains to California and Oregon. The native tribes will have disappeared and gone to their last home. Their last remove will have been made. They will live no longer in terror of the pale faces, but in the presence of the Great Spirit, whom they have seen in the clouds, and heard in the wind, the rain and the tempest. Their battles will have been all fought, and they will no longer pursue the buffalo over the level prairies. The buffaloes themselves will have disappeared, and given place to the arts of busy life and the innumerable works of civilized man.

No longer, under the spreading beach-tree, will the Indian lover woo his dusky mate, or follow the war path or track the deer through the boundless forests. His race will have performed their mission, and answered the designs of that Providence which placed them here, the first occupants of the soil, simple children of nature, wild, untaught and unteachable. Some compensation no doubt awaits them for the

sorrows and wrongs they have endured. They expect to find new hunting-grounds filled with deer and buffalo, and new rivers well stocked with fish. Let us hope they will find, if not these, something equally or better suited to their new condition, where hunting and fishing are unknown, and where there is neither war nor rumor of war.

After asking who dares predict the future of Kansas, I have ventured to imagine it the great centre and capital of an hundred or perhaps two hundred millions of people. This may seem to be the wild dreaming of a midsummer night, and yet the rapid increase of the country for the last twenty years, when we consider that this increase goes on in an accelerated ratio, gathering, like a snow-ball, strength as it goes, fully warrants us in our attempt at prophecy.

Not only the Irish, but the Germans and the Swedes are pouring in upon us, and seeking homes in what is now the far West, but which will soon be but a stopping-place, a sort of half-way house, where the western emigrant will halt for rest and refreshment. In five years or less, Lawrence will be an eastern city, and its inhabitants down-easters. A farmer on the western prairie will ask his neighbor if he is going down East, and engage him to buy his wife a dress at some of the splendid stores in the city of Lawrence, with plate-glass windows, brilliant gas