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 everyday 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.
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