who directed the Administration party were no match as tacticians for such file-leaders as Jefferson and Burr.  Many of their pet measures were ill-judged, to say the least.  The provisional army furnished a fertile theme for fierce declamation.  The black cockade became the badge of the supporters of government, so that in the streets one could tell at a glance whether friend or foe was approaching.  The Alien and Sedition Laws caused much bitter feeling and did great damage to the Federalists.  To read these acts and the trials under them now excites somewhat of the feeling with which we look upon some strange and clumsy engine of torture in a mediaeval museum.  How the temper of this people and their endurance of legal inflictions have changed since then!  There was Matthew Lyon, a noted Democrat of Irish origin, who had published a letter charging the President with “ridiculous pomp, idle parade, and selfish avarice.”  He was found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment and a fine of one thousand dollars.  There was Cooper, an Englishman, who fared equally ill for saying or writing that the President did not possess sufficient capacity to fulfil the duties of his office.  What should we think of the sanity of James Buchanan, should he prosecute and obtain a conviction against some Black-Republican Luther Baldwin of 1859, for wishing that the wad of a cannon, fired in his honor, might strike an unmentionable part of his august person?  What should we say, if Horace Greeley were to be arrested on a warrant issued by the Supreme Court of New York for a libel on Louis Napoleon, as was William Cobbett by Judge McKean of Pennsylvania for a libel on the King of Spain?

Fiercer and more bitter waxed party-discord, and both sides did ample injustice to one another.  Mr. Jefferson wrote, that men who had been intimate all their lives would cross the street and look the other way, lest they should be obliged to touch their hats.  And Gouverneur Morris gives us a capital idea of the state of feeling when he says that a looker-on, who took no part in affairs, felt like a sober man at a dinner when the rest of the company were drunk.  Civil war was often talked of, and the threat of secession, which has become the rhetorical staple of the South, produced solely for exportation to the North, to be used there in manufacturing pro-slavery votes out of the timidity of men of large means and little courage or perspicacity, was then freely made by both divisions of the Union.  Had we been of French or Spanish descent, there would have been barricades, coup-d’etats, pronunciamentos; but the English race know better how to treat the body-politic.  They never apply the knife except for the most desperate operations.  But where hard words were so plenty, blows could not fail.  Duels were frequent, cudgellings not uncommon,—­although as yet the Senate-Chamber had not been selected as the fittest scene for the use of the bludgeon.  It is true that molasses-and-water was the beverage allowed by Congress in those simple times, and that charged to stationery.