pleasure of printing in our January issue. He illustrated the vogue of the legend in an amusing way by showing that, in the recent voting for the Hall of Fame, Whitman received more votes than Senator Benton, Chief-Justice Chase or General Scott, and the same number as President Monroe. Then Mr. William I. Marshall of Chicago assailed the legend with much warmth, declaring that he had contended against it ever since 1888. He asserted that it first appeared in the Pacific, the organ of the California Congregationalists, in the issue for November 9, 1865, in an article by Rev. Mr. Spalding. He also made quotations from letters of Whitman and his wife, written during the year between the arrival of the Canadian immigrants and the beginning of his famous ride, and tending to show the motives for the latter. Mr. Marshall described his determined efforts to procure the elimination of the Whitman story from school text-books of history, even going so far as to read private letters received from the writers of such books. He was followed by Mr. Ripley Hitchcock of New York, who admitted that he had originally countenanced the story, but on examination was forced to give it up as Dr. Elliott Coues had also felt obliged to do. Mr. Hitchcock gave great credit to Mrs. Victor for her pioneer investigation, and concluded by pointing out some elements of the situation, in the Northwest and in American diplomacy, inconsistent with the legend.
The second of these papers in Western history was by Professor Samuel B. Harding of Indiana State University, and related to the Party Struggles in Missouri from 1861 to 1865. He described the contest of 1861 over the question of union or disunion, the varieties of party opinion then existing, the struggle of the unconditional-Union men against Governor Jackson, the actions of the convention, and the course of Captain Lyon, which, however effective in a military sense, he declared to have been politically a mistake. From the death of Lyon and the establishment of martial law, the opposition to secession passed into the hands of the military. The writer then turned to the other contest, that respecting slavery, and traced it from Gratz Brown's speech of 1858, but especially from 1861, through the period of radical supremacy made evident in the convention of 1863, and so to the convention of 1865 which abolished slavery. A new period then began, because of the disfranchising clause and the disabilities inherited from the Civil War. The narrative was continued to the election of Gratz Brown in 1870 and the end of the sway of the radicals.
Professor Frank H. Hodder of the University of Kansas then read a paper on An Omitted Chapter in the History of the Second
