11 distant fires—the deaths even of the offenders themselves, pitiable, although necessary and just, because they acted under delirium, which blinded their judgments to the real nature of their criminal enterprise; the alarm and consternation naturally awakened throughout the country, exciting, for the moment, the fear that our whole system, with all its securities for life and liberty, was coming to an end—a fear none the more endurable because continually aggravated by new chimeras tp which the great leading event lent an air of probability ; surely all these constituted a sum of public misery, which ought to have satisfied the most morbid appetite for social horrors. But, as in the case of the gunpowder plot, and the Salem witchcraft, and the New York colonial negro plot, so now ; the original actors were swiftly followed by another and kindred class, who sought to prolong and widen the public distress by attempting to direct the indignation which it had excited against parties guiltless equally of complicity and of sympathy with the offenders. Posterity will decide in all the recent cases where political responsibility for public disasters must fall; and posterity will give little heed to our instructions. It was not until the gloomy reign of Domi tian had ended, and liberty and virtue had found assured refuge under the sway of the milder Nerva, that the historian arose whose narrative of that period of tyranny and terror has been accepted by mankind. The Republican party being thus vindicated against the charge of hostility to the South, which has been bffered in excuse for the menaces of unconstitutional resistance i n the event of its success, I feel well assured that it will sustain me in meeting them in the spirit of the defender of the English Commonwealth : “ Surely they that shall boast as we do to be a free nation, and having the power, shall not also have the courage to remove, constitutionally, every Governor, whether he be the supreme or subordinate, may please their fancy with a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to cozen babies, but are, indeed, under tyranny and servitude, as wanting that power, which is the root and source of all liberty, to dispose of and economize in the land which God hath given them, as members of family in their own home and free inheritance. Without which natural and essential power of a free, nation, though bearing high their heads, they can, in due esteem, be thought no better than slaves and vassals born in the tenure and occupation of another inheriting lord, whose government, though not illegal or intolerable, hangs on two great political parties were peacefully, lawfully, and constitutionally, though zealously, conducting the great national issue between free labor and capital labor for the Territories to its proper solution, through the trials of the ballot, operating directly or indirectly on the various departments of the Government, a band of exceptional men, contemptuous equally of that great question and of the parties to the controversy, and impatient of the constitutional system which confines the citizens of every State to political action by suffrage, in organized parties within their own borders, inspired by an enthusiasm peculiar to themselves, and exasperated by grievances and wrongs that some of them had suffered by inroads of armed propagandists of slavery in Kansas, unlawful as their own retaliation was, attempted to subvert slavery in Virginia ' by conspiracy, ambush, invasion, and force. The method we have adopted, of appealing to the reason and judgment of the people, to be pronounced by suffrage, is the only one by which free government can be maintained anywhere, and the only one as yet devised which is in harmony with the spirit of the Christian religion. While generous and charitable natures will probably concede that John Brown and his associates acted on earnest though fatally erroneous convictions, yet all good citizens will nevertheless agree, that this attempt to execute an unlawful purpose in Virginia by invasion, involving servile war, was an act of sed- tion and treason, and criminal in just the extent that it affected the public peace and was destructive of human happiness and human life. It is a painful reflection that, after so long an experience of the beneficent working of our system as we have enjoyed, we have had these new illustrations in Kansas and Virginia of the existence among us of a class of men so misguided and so desperate as to seek to enforce their peculiar principles by the sword, drawing after it a need for the further illustration by their punishment of that great moral truth, especially applicable in a Republic, that they who take up the sword as a weapon of controversy shall perish by the sword. In the latter case, the lamented deaths of so many citizens, slain from an ambush and by surprise—all the more lamentable because they were innocent victims of a frenzy kindled without their agency, in far
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