was brushed which never quite came back. This was a deep pain to him. And if he gave some wounds whose scars did not heal, it must be said that the wounds he received. and no man got more hard thrusts were wont to heal quickly and kindly. If he was loath to express regret or reparation, neither did he exact it from others. To any overtures of reconciliation he made prompt and winning response. "The pleasantest man to make up with that I ever knew," said a life-long acquaintance. Such collisions as he had with his friends and acquaintances were almost always connected in some sort with the Republican. In the conduct of the paper, he meant to have his own way. Its success was the object of his life; its character he prized dearly as his own; its independence was his glory. Hardly even for friendship's sake would he permit it to swerve a hair'sbreadth from its wonted course. To make an explicit correction, or to withhold a piece of news which he thought the public entitled to, was a great and rare favor. A friend relates one such experience with him. “A man here got into a disreputable scrape, and many people knew it, but the papers hadn't got hold of it. His wife was a good woman, and I wanted to spare her the disgrace of having it all spread before the world. So I went to Mr. Bowles, and, seeing he knew nothing of the story, I gave it all to him. "Thank you,' said he, 'you have given me a valuable bit of news; we'll use it at once.' Said I, 'I don't want you to print it.' We argued a while, but it did no good. At last I got up from my seat and said, 'Mr. Bowles, suppose your daughter had married, and her husband turned out a scoundrel, and it was proposed to spread it all out before the whole country-how would you feel?" He gave me one of his infernal looks, black as a thunder-cloud, and said nothing for half a minute; then he said, 'Well, if the other papers

will say nothing, we will say nothing.' So it was kept quiet. After that I'd have gone through a block of burning buildings for him!"

He was a man who could unite an entire and life-long loyalty to one woman, the partner of his life, the mother of his children, and the mistress of his home, with intimate and mutually helpful friendships with other women. People often said of him that he was irreverent, but no one who knew him ever charged him with irreverence toward womanhood. He honored good women, he learned of them, and he used to say that the best wisdom and inspiration of his life had come through them. His attitude toward them in personal intercourse was manly and delicate. In the homage he paid, there was nothing of perilous sentiment, no philandering or flirtation. He met them with chivalrous appreciation of what was womanly, and on a footing of entire equality. His closest intimacies were with women of a characteristic New England type. There is in that section a class of such who inherit a fine intellect, an unsparing conscience, and a sensitive nervous organization; whose minds have a natural bent toward the problems of the soul and the universe; whose energies, lacking the outlet which business and public affairs give to their brothers, are constantly turned back upon the interior life, and who are at once stimulated and limited by a social environment which is serious, virtuous, and deficient in gayety and amusement. There is naturally developed in them high mental power, and almost morbid conscientiousness, while, especially in the many cases where they remain unmarried, the fervor and charm of womanhood are refined and sublimated from personal objects and devoted to abstractions and ideals. They are platonic in their attachments, and speculative in their religion;

intense rather than tender, and not so much soothing as stimulating. By the influence of such women Mr. Bowles's later life was colored-his views were broadened, his thoughts refined, his friendships exercised in offices of helpfulness and sympathy. By their acquaintance he was educated to a conviction of the entire equality of the feminine with the masculine mind, and its claim to an equal place in shaping the public and private life of the community, as well as its need of larger outlet and freer scope than society had hitherto assigned to it.

Among the strongest shaping influences of his life were those of the men and women with whom he came into intimacy. The formation of these friendships was among the chief epochs of his history. He owed to them something like that which the Mississippi owes to the Missouri, the Ohio, and all the streams that swell its waters from their early obscurity to an imperial flood. He was indebted less than most intellectual men to books. Newspapers were his chief literary food; and newspapers, with all they teach, teach but little of the heights and depths of humanity, and hint but scantily at its sublimity and tenderness. These higher lessons he learned by what was wrought out in him as he manfully did his work and bore his burden, and in no small degree from the human souls which opened their wealth to his insight and sympathy.)

He gave his friends of his very best in thought and labor, but above all other gifts was contact with his own vital, fructifying personality. All analysis will seem cold and all praise meager to those who knew and loved him best. Their common sentiment toward him was expressed by one who wrote, "Not to see you sometimes, not to hear from you, is a kind of eclipse." There were not a few whose feeling was akin to that expressed

by a Massachusetts judge, now dead, who wrote to him after a critical illness:

"As you know better than any one else, I do believe I should have gone over the dam from sheer depression, but for my wife and the cheerful words of half a dozen friends, of whom I put your name first on the list. God bless you for that, Sam Bowles! Now, I don't think you have committed many sins in the Republican" (this was in 1873, after the paper had brought on itself wrath and tribulation by its support of Greeley). "There is the same old tone to your paper, always on the side of honor and honesty, and I stand by you even in your mistakes, if they are mistakes. But you may perpetrate what you please from now till doomsday, in the columns of your paper,—you shall never make me feel you are any other than the kind sympathetic friend, who took his friend by the hand and with singular appreciation of his condition ministered to him as no one else could."

CHAPTER XX.

THE DRED SCOTT DECISION.- THE LECOMPTON

CONSTITUTION.

T was under Buchanan's administration that the tide turned decisively against slavery. His election was its last victory. He was elected by an alliance of three powers, the slaveholding interest, the Northern Democratic party, and those Northern conservatives who dreaded a sectional and aggressive tendency in the Republicans. His inauguration was closely followed by a decision of the Democratic Supreme Court which was a shock to all real conservatives. His Administration gave countenance to such usurpation in Kansas that a revolt was provoked among Northern Democrats. Then John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry filled the South with fears of Northern invasion and negro insurrection. This was the logic of events which united the North, and by its vote chose a Republican president, and led the South to leave the Union in which it had lost the mastery.

President Buchanan's inaugural, on the fourth of March, affirmed the right of the people of a territory to determine their institutions; but as to whether that right was to be exercised prior to their action in organizing a state government,- the only real point of controversy, he referred deferentially to the arbitrament of the Supreme Court. On the sixth of March the