The fear of opinion sometimes takes the form of an almost insane dread of responsibility. There are occasions when public men, unable to judge for themselves of particular classes of circumstances, are obliged to ask advice of their friends and supporters. Happy he who obtains a full and true answer from any one! The chances against this are in proportion to the importance of the case. I knew of one such instance, the result of which more than one is, I trust, now grieving over in his inmost heart. An eminent statesman was hesitating whether to offer himself as a candidate for a very high office. He requested the opinion and advice of a number of gentlemen in public life, his supporters. All were of the same opinion; that he should not stand. No one of them chose to take the responsibility of telling him so. Some of them wrote ambiguous answers, hoping that he would infer that they thought ill of his chance. Others rather encouraged the enterprise. The illustrative details which might be given,—showing the general uniformity, with particular diversity, of the conduct of the advisers,—would be amusing if they were not too sad. Suffice it that no one, as far as I could learn, could get over his fear of responsibility so as to be faithful. They allowed their idol to make a fool of himself. If he should henceforth be sunk in political scepticism, perhaps these gentlemen may find that in shunning one kind of responsibility, they have incurred another, far heavier.
It is felt, and understood, in the United States, that their near future in politics is indiscernible. Odd, unexpected circumstances, determining the present, are perpetually turning up. Almost every man has his convictions as to what the state of affairs will be, in the gross, a century hence. Scarcely any man will venture a conjecture as to what will have happened next spring. This is the very condition, if the people could but see it, for the exercise of faith in principles. With a dark and shifting near future, and a bright and fixed ultimate destiny, what is the true, the only wisdom? Not to pry into the fogs and thickets round about, or to stand still for fear of what may next occur in the path; but to look from Eden gate behind to heaven gate before, and press on to the certain future. In his political as in his moral life, man should, in the depth of his ignorance and the fallibility of his judgment, throw himself, in a full sense of security, upon principles; and then he is safe from being depressed by opposition, or scared by uncertainty, or depraved by responsibility.
SECTION IV.
ALLEGIANCE TO LAW.
It is notorious that there is a remarkable failure in this department of political morals among certain parties in the United States. The mobbing events of the last few years are celebrated; the abolition riots in New York and Boston; the burning of the Charleston Convent; the bank riots at Baltimore; the burning of the mails at Charleston; the hangings by Lynch-law at Vickesburgh; the burning alive of a man of colour at St. Louis; the subsequent proceedings there towards the students of Marion College; and the abolition riots at Cincinnati. Here is a fearful list!
The first question that arises is, who has done these things? Whose hands have lighted green fagots round a living man? and strung up a dozen or twenty citizens on the same gallows? and fired and razed houses; and sent a company of trembling nuns flying for their lives at midnight? Here is evidence enough of ignorance,—of desperate, brutal ignorance. Whose ignorance?
In Europe, the instantaneous and natural persuasion of men who hear the tidings is, that the lowest classes in America have risen against the higher. In Europe, desperate, brutal ignorance is the deepest curse in the cursed life of the pauper and the serf. In Europe, mobbing is usually the outbreak of exasperated misery against laws which oppress, and an aristocracy which insults humanity. Europeans, therefore, naturally assume that the gentry of the United States are the sinned against, and the poor the sinners, in their social disturbances. They draw conclusions against popular government, and suppose it proved that universal suffrage dissolves society into chaos. They picture to themselves a rabble of ragged, desperate workmen, with torches in their hands; while the gentry look on in dismay, or tremble within their houses.
It is not so. I was informed, twenty times over, by gentlemen, that the Boston mob of last year was wholly composed of gentlemen. The only working man in it was the truck-man who saved the victim. They were the gentlemen of St. Louis who burned the black man, and banished the students of Marion College. They were the gentlemen of Cincinnati who denounced the abolitionists, and raised the persecution against them. They were the magistrates and gentry of Vickesburgh who hanged way-farers, gamblers, and slaves in a long row. They were the gentlemen of Charleston who broke open the Post Office, and violated its sacred function, to the insult and injury of the whole country.
The case is plain. There are no paupers to rise against oppressive laws in a country, where the laws are made by all, and where pauperism is thereby excluded. There is no degraded class, subject to insults from the highest, which can be resented only by outrage. The assumption is a false one, that ignorance and poverty, knowledge and wealth, go together. Mobbing for European causes, and in European modes, is absolutely precluded where political rights are universal, and political power equally diffused through all classes.
The very few European causes which are in analogy with United States mobbing, are those riots for opinion, which bear only a subordinate relation to politics; such as the Birmingham riots, and the attempt of the Liverpool merchants to push Clarkson into the dock. The cases are very similar. The mobs of America are composed of high churchmen, (of whatever denomination,) merchants and planters, and lawyers.