ог M.D. BY ROBERT MAYO, M. D. Author of an Inaugural Thesis on the Sensorium, University of Pennsylvania, 1808; US.50 35.13 ENTERED according to the Act of Congress, on the twenty-seventh day of December, one thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight, by ROBERT Mayo, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Columbia. PREFACE. FROM a transient glance, at the panorama of political events that have crowded the canvass within the last eight or ten years, it has at length become apparent to every eye that those great operatives TIME and EXPERIENCE are bringing all their resources to bear on the fate of our once promising constitutions of government; the one aiming its withering powers at their destruction, the other exerting its conservative faculties to cure the diseases which have at the same time been gradually undermining them. In this political portraiture, the recent demonstrations of the federal Executive upon the government of the state of Pennsylvania stands in bold relief, and deserves the close inspection of every American citizen, as well as the serious deliberations of every statesman. To aid them in making out a more digested and methodical sketch of the materials which compose this section of the general scheme, I have thrown together in a Postscript to Part the First of this work, the principal facts with appropriate reflections from the columns of distinguished editors and other unquestionable authorities. For a more ample review of our whole political canvass with the diversified commentaries connected with the present important epoch in the history of free government, I would commend the historian to an examination of the leading journals of either political party, as the best sources of a correct narrative of the varying phases and incidents of American history, except where the facts are incontrovertibly established by public records, official reports, and congressional proceedings. In the following work I have proposed to myself the lighter task of bringing the prominent features of these materials together in such connection of affinity which cause and effect have appeared to my mind to point out, in order to demonstrate their practical bearing upon the durability of our institutions. And I am truly grieved, as an American citizen, to say, that in looking deeper than the mere surface of the recent rebellion at Harrisburg, a most atrocious conspiracy of the members of the federal Executive against the stability and purity of our popular institutions, both state and federal, is obvious and undeniable; and that the agency of corrupt men of all parties throughout the Union, are among the means resorted to, to promote and accomplish their purpose. For, though the outbreak has taken place in Pennsylvania, the scheme of disorganization is not confined to that state. True, their operations have been more industriously pursued in that state, as the most suitable theatre, from its central position and other appliances, to enact the first part of their diabolical tragedy. In making this exposition the more clear and conclusive, I have thought it proper to remount a little beyond the day, to show the quo animo of their former rehearsals upon the same, and the adjoining theatre of Maryland; but not meaning it shall be inferred by these selections, that the like have not taken place in New York, Baltimore, Boston, and elsewhere, as part and parcel of the various riots that have occurred by their direct or indirect instigation of the deluded democracy of numbers. The following sagacious remarks of the experienced editor of the Baltimore Merchant will give a foretaste of those sinister party proceedings as exhibited in the Postscript above mentioned. These extracts are indeed invaluable as a preliminary to those exhibits; and they are still the more so for the facts embraced in the first, particularly, which, to my mind, taken in connection with other facts in every man's recollection, go to correct a very fatal error that has heretofore tended more to inflame and perpetuate party dissensions and denunciations than all other causes united. That error consists in the sweeping injustice with which political parties are wont to stigmatize their adversaries, in mass, as being actuated by views and objects inimical to the interests of particular States, of the Union, or of the general wellfare. But whatever may have been the radical and irreconcilable differences between the views and principles of the WHIGS of the revolution and the TORIES of that day, it is clear to my comprehension, upon a fair inspection of the materials which of late years have entered into the composition of the Jack-Van Buren party, that Mr. Jefferson was mistaken in denouncing the FEDERALISTS (who derived their cognomen from their advocacy and success in the adoption of the federal constitution) as hostile to republican principles and the best interests of the Union. So palpable an inconsistency charged, and injustice practised, towards those ever to be gratefully remembered patriots, down to the last day of his life, is the more surprising, as he had, at his first inauguration, in the true spirit of that compromise which took place between his friends and opponents in son effecting his election, solemnly and truly declared that 'we are all federalists, we are all republicans.' And under a like estimate of those who have renounced and abandoned the unrighteous firm of Jackson and Van Buren in disgust, it is equally erroneous in the federalists, federal republicans or whigs, to denounce the self-styled REPUBLICANS per excellence in a body, as radical anarchists and disorganizers, inimical to social order and the supremacy of the laws, instigators of mobs, insurrections, and the levelling process of agrarianism in impugning the sacred rights of property and the inviolability of contracts. Yes, when we see daily before our revolted sense of consistency and common honesty (patriotism out of the question as a stale and unfashionable commodity) that the JacksonVan Buren party, is, in a great degree, made up of odds and ends of all parties, consisting of men of broken fortunes and crooked principles, of easy consciences and adventurous spirits, we are justified in the deduction, that the censures reciprocally cast upon each other by conflicting parties, properly belong only to the dishonest individuals of either party, who have come into the political market with the price of their consciences on their tongues, and are ready to serve any party that happens to be uppermost, or is so likely to be, and will pay them best. My inference, therefore, is, that an honest man, whether he assumes the party denomination of whig, republican, federalist, federal-republican, democrat, or democratic-republican, or any other of the hundred denominations of party nomenclature, is worth a thousand dishonest men, whatever may be their hollow professions of devotion to the will and the interest of the people. An HONEST MAN, whose fundamental principle necessarily is to give every man his due, is a patriot, a philanthropist, and pre-eminently a republican, all the world over, be the banner under which he is enlisted or the country of his allegiance what they may : while a DISHONEST MAN is the reverse of this, under whatever form of government he may live, or whatever party professions he may attempt to deceive others withal. Nay, an honest, patriotic, and magnanimous PRINCE, for all practical good, is preferable to a dishonest, hypocritical, canting Loco Foco of the Tammany Hall, district attorney, PRICE, or Independence Square, would have been tory, and now rebel, blood-thirsty, INGERSOLL stamp. But there are so few honest men in the world, that I would take no man upon trust, no matter what party colour he professes. And certainly not him, under any considerations, who can have the hardihood to sow rebellion at broad-cast and in every form throughout the land, by proclaiming the heresy, that 'government is instituted to secure the greatest benefits to the greatest number;' thereby instilling the mischievous, preda |