Destitute of the lubricating influences of a deep-seated reverence for Law and Order, the whole machine of government drags heavily, and, from the friction of its parts, soon wears out, which gives rise to innumerable dynasties and interminable changes. In such a state, too, there is no security for the exercise of individual opinion; but the Mob spirit binds down all to a slavish conformity to popular ignorance and prejudice. Nay, more: to the class of independent minds, property and even life itself are left in fearful jeopardy. Thus we flatter ourselves that we have succeeded in establishing the seemingly paradoxical proposition, that, in proportion as Law is more universal in its action, more all-penetrating in its effects, its yoke becomes easier—its friction less severe in other words, as the weight is increased, the burden is diminished; as it circulates farther from the central heart, it flows with more strength and freedom through its arteries.

Law is indeed God's vicegerent upon earth. Deriving its authority from Him, and faintly shadowing forth the glories of His more perfect Law, it does for the external man what the Gospel rule accomplishes for the inner man of the heart. If it cannot compel him to love his neighbor as himself, it at least restrains his natural selfishness within such limits as are consistent with the safety of society. While it affords him his only security in the enjoyment of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," it compels him to accord the same privileges to his fellow-man. It protects the Non-conformist in his religious faith, the Reformer in his warfare with popular prejudice, nay, even the Jew and the Infidel in the enjoyment of religious freedom. Like Atlas supporting a world upon his shoulders, it sustains the whole tissue of our institutions, it bears up the whole fabric of human government. It is the rock on which rests the whole social system, and if its strength be impaired, the whole system tumbles into fragments.

If such be Law, how fiendish is the act of him who violates it, who boldly advocates the doctrines of Mob rule, and raises a demon spirit which it is beyond his power to lay at rest? The Mob spirit is in violation of Divinely-sanctioned Law-of the express command of Heaven, to "obey the powers that be, as ordained of God." Because the Law is sometimes slow in the punishment of crime,-because, like all else of human invention, it partakes somewhat in the imperfections of humanity, and thereby suffers the guilty to escape,-because it refuses to deny its protection to the alien, the outcast, the down-trodden, because it extends its broad shield over the Catholic, the Jew, the Mormon,—because it protects the African in his attempts to rise from the mire of his degradation to the level of our common humanity, men have been found ready to violate its most sacred provisions, to tear the criminal from under the Ægis of its protection, to trample on the rights of their fellow-citizens, and to kindle the flames of the Mob spirit, though they may burn with the unquenchable fury of the Greek fire. And can such an act ever be justifiable? What can be more absurd than to break the Law, that we may mend it ? What can ever justify an act which tears from us those rights stated in the Declaration of Independence to be inalienable-rights, some of

which, as that of "trial by one's peers," date back as far as Magna Charta, which overturns the whole fabric of our institutions, and sets at defiance the laws of God and man? We can conceive of no circumstance which can make it right for the fiat of a lawless mob to reverse or to anticipate the decisions of Justice. 'Tis better that the criminal should remain unpunished, that the murderer go unhanged, that the seducer escape unwhipped of justice, than to commit an act which involves a whole community in a common guilt. 'Tis better to let your bigotry feed upon its own vitals, than to do a deed which shall lower your country in the eyes of the world, and imprint upon her national escutcheon a dark and eternal stain.

He who enkindles the Mob'spirit, can never anticipate the consequences of his act. He uncovers the crater of a slumbering volcano, whose streams of burning lava may in a single day overwhelm all he holds most dear on earth,-Constitution, Law, Government, Religion, Home. How fearful an example of this was afforded in the horrible excesses of the French revolution, when Religion and Government were guillotined together in an hour by a frantic Mob! A spectacle scarcely less appalling has been recently presented in the Canton of the Pays de Vaud, in Switzerland. By a mobocrat rebellion of the true Dorrite genus, a free and happy people have been in one short month converted into a raging democracy, a Protestant into an Infidel community, and now the ministers of Christ are prohibited from preaching to their flocks within sight of the home of Calvin.

But the origin of Mobs is as ignoble as their end is terrible. They almost invariably spring from the passions and prejudices of the populace, being excited against a small class in the community, who refuse to surrender all freedom of mind and heart to the dictation of the majority. Indeed, we feel assured that a careful analysis of the motives which lead men to engage in them, could not fail to exhibit à craving desire to put down freedom of opinion as their efficient cause, as the mainspring of the whole movement. Whether it be displayed in the Anti-Catholic riots which for three days converted London into a battle-field, in the assaults upon abolitionists, which continually disgrace our country, in the attack on Mr. Clay's office at Lexington, or in the Lynch Law of the South, the spirit is ever one and the same, under whatever phase it presents itself. It is perhaps the highest end of Law to protect the minority in the enjoyment of their rights. But this foul spirit, bidding defiance to the Law, gives the death-blow to all freedom of mind and of thought, to the free expression of individual opinion, and compels all to a slavish conformity, or to suffer the destruction of their property, nay, even the loss of life. It makes public opinion popular despotism, the public will the slavery of the individual, the public good the destruction of the citizen. It is ever made the instrument of religious and political intolerance, and kindles between different classes of the same community an inextinguishable hate. Those feuds between the Orange and the Green which have so long distracted unhappy Ireland, are our witnesses. The Catholic riots of London and the massacre of St. Bartholomew's day, tell but

too fearfully their tale of horrors. Surely, if Vox Populi be ever Vox Dei, as some men suppose, it bears little resemblance to "the still small voice of God," when expressed in the loud-mouthed uproars of a raging Mob.

But while Mobs are thus terrible for evil, they are powerless for good. Being merely ebullitions of intense passion, without concert of action, without any definite and specific object in view, even when instituted for the express purpose of resistance to oppression, they seldom result in any good, almost never in a permanent revolution. But when this does take place, and the fabric of government is once laid prostrate, then "Let him that is in Judea flee to the mountains," for his country is on the eve of a revolution, whose convulsive throes shall dislocate every joint in the social system. The superlative horrors of the revolution in France are to be attributed, we think, not so much even to their previous oppression, as to the fact, that it was achieved almost solely by an infuriated Mob. That alone can be productive of lasting benefit, which involves least of the Mob spirit, which proceeds most on the basis of the Law and the Constitution, and which in fact is commenced, like the English revolution and our own; to defend Law from usurpation, not to overthrow it.

Mob Law, then, when employed for the punishment of crime, involves in itself a deeper, because more widely-extended, guilt. It subverts the right of trial by Jury, and wrests from the citizen his dearest and most valued privileges. When employed against any particular class of the community, it tears from us that most precious fruit of the Reformation, Freedom of Thought, and denies to the citizen the great end and aim of Law, protection to the rights of the minority. When exercised in resistance to oppression, it breaks up the fountains of the great deep of society, and sets all we hold most dear afloat on a raging sea of passion. At all times, then, and under all circumstances, it is UNJUSTIFIABLE, DANGEROUS, DESTRUCTIVE.

THE WISH OF THE MAN OF CARE.

WHEN duty presses all the day,

From its breaking to its close,
And the busy mind is still at work,
Though the body takes repose;
And the sleepless brain is full of thoughts,
And the thoughts are full of pain,
I think of childhood's careless hours,
And wish them back again.

For then, when evening had come on
And sealed the eye of day,

And the working-man his labor left,

And the idle boy his play ;

bol tow

When the gentle stars, each in his place,
Stood out upon the sky,

And gazed upon the large fair earth
With fixed and fervent eye;—

When the household gathers round the hearth,
And the good-man takes the Book,
And the good-dame checks the childrens' sport
With sharp reproving look ;

When the holy prayer is spoken,

And the cheerful hymn is sung,

And each gives each the warm lip-token,
With a "goodnight" on the tongue;-

When the world of sense is quite shut out,
And the world of fancy in ;
Yet every thing is real and true,
Save the one fact of sin;
Then, nothing jarred our slumber,

Or broke upon our dreams,

Till the red round sun had risen up,

And woke us with his beams.

EARNWALL

THOUGHTS ON THE SOCIAL COMPACT.

If government be founded in a Social Compact, we must suppose that, before the formation of that compact, man being in what is technically styled "the state of nature," each individual member of the human family constituted in himself a free sovereign and independent state, and that society was composed as it were of unconnected particles, until the social compact, infusing into the mass cohesive power, hardened the loose aggregation into that firm foundation, have been reared all the institutions of civil society. To this view we have several objections, which will be briefly stated.

This theory seems, if not to involve, at least to be intimately allied with, that other one which we consider equally erroneous: we mean the doctrine which maintains that the race, originally savage, has been progressively developed to its present high state of civilization. This mistaken idea we have, without due consideration, received from antiquity. Had man been created a barbarian, he must always have remained so. In every nation, civilization has advanced under external, not internal, influences. Of an entirely isolated people, emerging from the savage into the civilized state, History furnishes no instance. The leaven must have been applied from without, or the untutored mind had never expanded into intellectual life. The doctrine of a State of Nature, in all its bearings on civil and political relations, de

serves to be buried along with the exploded dogmas of the Scholastic Philosophy.

Government, as we hold, derives its origin from a higher source than the Social Compact, or any merely human authority-from the Creator Himself. In the institution of the family, God planted the seed of all human government. This germ, as the race increased, has itself expanded in all directions, co-extensively with the wants which it was to supply. It seems clear that the complicated mechanism of the celestial motions can, with no more certainty, be derived from the great law of gravity, than government can be deduced from the institution of the family relation. As in that exquisite organ, the human eye, the Creator has exhibited a perfect model of adaptation to the laws of optics, by imitating which in artificial instruments, man has been enabled to attain such wonderful results; so in the institution of the family, He has presented us with a perfect model of a political community. After this pattern every human government has been constructed, though, with all their cumbrous machinery, they fall infinitely short of their faultless original.

In the patriarchal age men reasoned but little about inalienable rights; they were compelled by the presence of dangers from without, to coalesce and form societies. And here we see the gradual development of the family relation. As the original stock increased and sent off its colonies in divergent radii from the common centre Ararat, the father of a family soon becoming the head of a tribe or clan, the patriarchal age commenced; so that from the family to the community was but a single step. As the race continued to increase, the tribe soon rose into the nation, and the patriarch, in some cases, became the king, while in others the patriarchal authority, gradually becoming extinguished, gave place to the Democratic form of government. it appears that from the family may be derived, by gentle and natural gradations, every existing system of polity. And this may be done. without resorting to the cumbrous hypothesis of a Social Compact, invented by certain philosophers to prove a favorite theory. Thus on the Newtonian principle of philosophizing, " to assign no more reasons than are necessary to account for the phenomena," this brilliant conception of Locke proves to be far more beautiful than useful.

Thus

But again, this theory unfortunately will not bear to be carried out to the ultimate conclusions that can be logically deduced from it. These conclusions shock the susceptibilities of its most strenuous advocates. If government is based upon a Social Compact, we must at once remove all restraints upon the right of suffrage; for the authority of law being founded in the consent of the governed, this becomes a sacred and inalienable right. The felon and the foreigner may boldly demand access to the ballot-box, as an inalienable privilege, of which none of the petty considerations of personal character, public expediency, or want of any arbitrary qualifications for citizenship, can justly deprive them. Our naturalization laws, too, and the statute that a freeman must vote in the town or state in which he resides, are palpably unjust. Indeed, all laws relating to the subject are utterly useless;