The danger is now over, and we find it hard to make real to our imagination the terrors of a mob such as swarms out of the dens of Liverpool and London.  We know well enough in this country what Irish mobs are:  the Old Country exports them to us in pieces, ready to put together on arriving, as we send houses to California.  Ireland is the country of shillalahs and broken crowns, of Donnybrook fairs, where men with whiskey in their heads settle their feuds or work off their sprightliness with the arms of Nature, sometimes aided by the least dangerous of weapons.  But England is the land of prize-fights, of scientific brutality, which has flourished under the patronage of her hereditary legislators and other “Corinthian” supporters.  The pugilistic dynasty came in with the House of Brunswick, and has held divided empire with it ever since.  The Briton who claims Chatham’s language as his mother-tongue may appropriate the dialect of the ring as far more truly indigenous than the German-French of his every-day discourse.  Of the three Burkes whose names are historical, the orator is known to but a few hundred thousands.  The prize-fighter, with his interesting personal infirmity, is the common property of the millions, and would have headed the list in celebrity, but for that other of the name who added a new invention to the arts of industry and enriched the English language with a term which bids fair to outlive the reputation of his illustrious namesake.  Around the professors and heroes of the art of personal violence are collected the practitioners of various callings less dignified by the manly qualities they demand.  The Gangs of Three that waylay the solitary pedestrian,—­the Choker in the middle, next the victim who is to be strangled and cleaned out,—­the larger guilds of Hustlers who bonnet a man and beat his breath out of him and empty his pockets before he knows what is the matter with him,—­the Burglars, with their “jimmies” in their pockets,—­the fighting robbers, with their brass knuckles,—­the whole set in a vast thief-constituency, thick as rats in sewers,—­these were the disputants whom the emissaries of the Slave Power called upon to refute the arguments of the Brooklyn clergyman.

It was not pleasant to move in streets where such human rattlesnakes and cobras were coiling and lying in wait.  Great cities are the poison-glands of civilization everywhere; but the secretions of those hideous crypts and blind passages that empty themselves into the thoroughfares of English towns are so deadly, that, but for her penal colonies, England, girt by water, as the scorpion with flame, would perish, self-stung, by her own venom.  The legates of the great Anti-Civilization have colonized England, as England has colonized Botany Bay.  They know the venal ruffianism of the fist and bludgeon, as well as that of the press.  Fortunately, they are short of funds, or Mr. Beecher might have disappeared after the manner of Romulus, and never have come to light, except in the saintly fashion of relics,—­such as white finger-rings and breastpins, like those which some devotees of the Southern mode of worship are said to have been fond of wearing.