y
stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud acclaim upon the
liberty of speech and of the press; liberty, nay license, to deal with
government, with leaders, with every measure, however urgent, in any
terms they choose, to traduce the officer before his own soldiers, and
assail the only men who have any claim at all to rule over the country,
as the very ones who are least worthy to be obeyed. If these opposition
members of society are to have their way now, they cannot find fault
with those persons who spoke their minds freely in the past on that
great question which, as we have agreed, underlies all our present
dissensions.

It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often shown towards
reformers. They are never general favorites. They are apt to interfere
with vested rights and time-hallowed interests. They often wear an
unlovely, forbidding aspect. Their office corresponds to that of
Nature's sanitary commission for the removal of material nuisances. It
is not the butterfly, but the beetle, which she employs for this duty.
It is not the bird of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of dark
plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is entrusted the sacred duty of
eliminating the substances that infect the air. And the force of obvious
analogy teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please the
general taste in those whose instincts lead them to attack the moral
nuisances which poison the atmosphere of society. But whether they
please us in all their aspects or not, is not the question. Like them or
not, they must and will perform their office, and we cannot stop them.
They may be unwise, violent, abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but
they are alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove abuses
as soon as they are dead, and often to help them to die. To quarrel with
them because they are beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far
from profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for being trodden
upon, like those tough weeds that love to nestle between the stones
of court-yard pavements. If you strike at one of their heads with the
bludgeon of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seedcapsule
of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with seminal thoughts which
will spring up in a crop just like the original martyr. They chased one
of these enthusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and shot him
at Alton in 1837; and on the 23d of June just passed, the Gover