representatives.

The capacity of the people for self-government, and their willingness,
from a high sense of duty and without those exhibitions of coercive
power so generally employed in other countries, to submit to all
needful restraints and exaction s of municipal law, have also been
favorably exemplified in the history of the American States.
Occasionally, it is true, the ardor of public sentiment, outrunning the
regular progress of the judicial tribunals or seeking to reach cases
not denounced as c riminal by the existing law, has displayed itself in
a manner calculated to give pain to the friends of free government and
to encourage the hopes of those who wish for its overthrow. These
occurrences, however, have been far less frequent in our country than
in any other of equal population on the globe, and with the diffusion
of intelligence it may well be hoped that they will constantly diminish
in frequency and violence. The generous patriotism and sound common
sense of the great mass of our fellow-ci tizens will assuredly in time
produce this result; for as every assumption of illegal power not only
wounds the majesty of the law, but furnishes a pretext for abridging
the liberties of the people, the latter have the most direct and
permanent interest i n preserving the landmarks of social order and
maintaining on all occasions the inviolability of those constitutional
and legal provisions which they themselves have made.

In a supposed unfitness of our institutions for those hostile
emergencies which no country can always avoid their friends found a
fruitful source of apprehension, their enemies of hope. While they
foresaw less promptness of action than in governments differently
formed, they overlooked the far more important consideration that with
us war could never be the result of individual or irresponsible will,