After years spent in the uncertain tactics of this half barbaric warfare, he was removed, in the height of political strife in Kansas, to its very centre.  Here, while comparatively free from the wearisome requirements of active service such as had been demanded in California, and at a time when events the most portentous proved clearly to the great minds of the country the advance of a political crisis whose consequences must be most important, involving—­should deep-laid conspiracy be successful—­the bankruptcy of principle and that high-handed outrage, the triumph, of a minority,—­Captain Lyon had full liberty and abundant opportunity to settle for himself the great questions mooted in the Missouri Compromises, the Lecompton Constitutions and the Dred Scott decisions of the day.  To a mind unprejudiced, except as the honest impulses of every honest man’s heart are always prejudiced in favor of the right, there was but a single decision.  Disgusted with the heartless policy which democracy had for so many years pursued, and which now threatened to culminate either in its utter degradation at the North, or in the establishment in the South of an oligarchy which would annihilate all free action and suppress all free opinion, he severed his connection with that party,—­a step to which he was also impelled by the injustice that was then seeking to force upon the people of Kansas an institution which they condemned as unproductive and expensive, to say nothing of their moral repugnance to the very A B C of its principles.  It was at this time that Captain Lyon contributed to the Manhattan Express, a weekly journal of the neighborhood, a series of papers in which he took an earnest, manly and decided stand in favor of the principles which his thoughtful mind recognized as alone ‘reliable,’ and harmonious with the grand design and end of the great Republic of the West.  To these articles we shall hereafter refer, at present hastening through the career, so striking and so sad, which a few brief months cut short, leaving only the memory of General Lyon as a legacy to the country his single aim and wise counsels would have saved.

The guns of Fort Sumter had flashed along our coast an appeal whose force no words can ever compute.  The days had been busy with the assembling of armies, the nights restless with their solemn marches, and forge and factory rang with the strokes of the hammer and the whirr of flying shafts, whose echoes seemed measured to the air of some new Marseillaise.  From our homes rushed forth sons, husbands, brothers, fathers, followed by the prayers and blessings of dear women, who yielded them early but willingly to their country.  And while regiments clustered along the Potomac, and Washington lay entrenched behind white lines of tents, we find our soldier, fresh from Kansas strifes, in command of the United States Arsenal at St. Louis; and to his prompt action and decided measures at this important juncture the early success of the