of ancestors.  Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only to transmit these, the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation—­to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.  This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

How, then, shall we perform it?—­At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?  By what means shall we fortify against it?  Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?  Never!—­All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us.  It cannot come from abroad.  If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill omen amongst us.  I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.  This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny.  Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times.  They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana;—­they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slave-holding or the non-slave-holding states.  Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits.—­Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.

It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of them.  Those, happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis are, perhaps, the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity.  In the Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers—­a set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or very honest occupation; but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was actually