The question becomes still more pressing owing to Governor Walker's testimony that when he reached Washington, "the President himself distinctly and emphatically assured me that he had not authorized anybody to say that he had approved of that [Lecompton] programme." On whose authority, then, did Calhoun declare that the Administration had changed its mind?
[Illustration: FREDERICK P.STANTON.] [Sidenote] John Bell, Senate Speech, March 18, 1858.
This query brings us to another point in President Buchanan's letter of October 22, in which he mentions that Secretary Cobb, of his Cabinet, had without his knowledge suppressed the publication of certain letters in the "Washington Union." These were, as we learn elsewhere, the letters in which some of the Kansas pro-slavery leaders repeated their declaration of the hopelessness of any further contest to make Kansas a slave-State.

Why this secret suppression by Secretary Cobb?
There is but one plausible explanation of this whole chain of contradictions.

The conclusion is almost forced upon us that a Cabinet intrigue, of which the President was kept in ignorance, was being carried on, under the very eyes of Mr.Buchanan, by those whom he himself significantly calls "the extremists"-- a plot to supersede his own intentions and make him falsify his own declarations.

As in the case of similar intrigues by the same agents a few years later, he had neither the wit to perceive nor the will to resist.
[Sidenote] Stanton, Philadelphia Speech, Feb.

8, 1858.
The protest of the people of the Territory against the extraordinary action of the Lecompton Convention almost amounted to a popular revolt.