discussion, blended with unimpaired fraternal feeling.

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 exactions 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 criminal 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-citizens 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 in 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