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.