Fra Diavolo and his Italian Brigands.
Three hundred and sixteen thousand dollars have been drawn from the Municipal Treasury, for printing the worthless Records of the County Clerk’s office, and nearly as much for the Register’s Records. Who got the $550,000 for which there is nothing valuable to show? Can the smooth, and glossy, and sweetly-scented Connolly, or Wetmore, (or Busteed and his kinsman, Doane,) or Nathan, or Nelson tell us? Of course they can, as they were the corrupt disbursers of this prodigious plunder. Speak, then, ye infernal robbers of the toiling millions, whom ye bamboozle, and starve, and disease, and jam, and ram, and smother in cellars and attics and tenement houses, and whose devoted wives and virgin daughters you drive unto prostitution for food and rent and medicine and apparel. You consummate these pernicious wrongs and oppressions through your Janus and Judas professions of democracy, which no more resemble Jefferson’s, Madison’s, Calhoun’s and Jackson’s political creed, than your sleek hair, and fancy apparel, and thievish propensities resemble the simple garb and integrity of those democratic legions, whose votes you literally steal through your honied political heresies, and the lavish expenditure of the very money you steal from the people, through such jobs as the Record printing. With fast horses, wines, and costly gluttony, and daubed all over with pomatum, you revel high in your dazzling Persian Pavilions, whose construction and gilded furniture, and luscious viands, are stolen directly from the honorable and deluded millions. These are truths, and we will proclaim them from the steeples of the metropolis, and strive to arouse a people who slumber on the confines of volcanoes, while thieves, and rapes, and incendiaries, and midnight assassins are softly crawling towards their throats. Your perjured alienage we might extenuate, but your robbery of the honest and laborious masses we will expose and combat, if we rot in the dungeons of Blackwell’s or Sing Sing. The purest editors of this thievish age are too pliable, and politic, and mercenary for the public welfare; but we will dissect your robbery, if we are crucified with spikes, and our limbs are chopped and hacked with a butcher’s axe, and our flesh, blood, bones and marrow burned to cinders, and our ashes cast upon the whirlwind for annihilation. The axe and faggot we defy. God only do we fear. So, come on, ye teeming caverns of infernal thieves, and seize, and incarcerate, and butcher, and strive to annihilate our mortal scabbard, but you shall not have the soul, which will elude your wicked and revengeful grasp, and have eternal succor in the realms of purity and bliss, if, in its mortal pilgrimage, it be true to God and his pilfered, oppressed, and misanthropic children.
