Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/696

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MINORITY REPORT.

deciding elections, or any other purpose, will be repelled; that unauthorized intermeddling in the local concerns of the territory, both from adjoining and distant states, will be prevented; that the federal and local laws will be vindicated against all attempts of organized resistance; and that the people of the territory will be protected in the establishment of their own institutions, undisturbed by encroachments from without, and in the full enjoyment of the rights of self-government assured to them by the constitution and the organic law.

In view of these assurances, given under the conviction that the existing laws confer all authority necessary to the performance of these important du< ties, and that the whole available force of the United States will be exerted to the extent required for their performance, your committee repose in entire confidence that peace, and security, and law, will prevail in Kansas. If any further evidence were necessary to prove that all the collisions and difficulties in Kansas were produced by the schemes of foreign interference which have been developed in this report, in violation of the principles and in evasion of the provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska act, it may be found in the fact that in Nebraska, to which the emigrant-aid societies did not extend their operations, and into which the stream of emigration was permitted to flow in its usual and natural channels, nothing has occurred to disturb the peace and harmony of the territory, while the principle of self-government, in obedience to the constitution, has had fair play, and is quietly working out its legitimate results.

It now only remains for your committee to respond to the two specific recommendations of the president, in his special message.

In compliance with the first recommendation, your committee ask leave to report a bill authorizing the legislature of the territory to provide by law for the election of delegates by the people, and the assembling of a convention to form a constitution and state government preparatory to their admission into the Union on an equal footing with the original states, so soon as it shall appear, by a census to be taken under the direction of the governor, by the authority of the legislature, that the territory contains ninety-three thousand four hundred and twenty inhabitants—that being the number required by the present ratio of representation for a member of congress.

In compliance with the other recommendation, your committee propose to offer to the appropriation bill an amendment appropriating such sum as shall be found necessary, by the estimates to be obtained, for the purpose indicated in the recommendation of the president.

All of which is respectfully submitted to the senate by your committee.

Mr. Collamer, of Vermont, the minority member of said committee, submitted the following

MINORITY REPORT.

Thirteen of the present prosperous states of this Union passed through the period of apprenticeship or pupilage of territorial training, under the guardianship of congress, preparatory to assuming their proud rank of manhood as sovereign and independent states. This period of their pupilage was, in every case, a period of the good offices of parent and child, in the kind relationship