ist in such peril as that. Does any one suppose,
that, if the Gunpowder Plot had been a success,--that, if King, Lords,
and Commons had all been hoisted by Mr. Fawkes, the English nation would
have gone to wreck, that it could not have survived the loss of most of
the royal family, the greater part of the peerage, and most of the
gentlemen who had been chosen to serve in the House of Commons? England
would have survived such a blow as that blowing-up would have inflicted
on her, though for the time she might have been in a very confused
condition; and so we should have survived--and we believe without
exhibiting much confusion--all the efforts of assassins to murder our
leading men, had those efforts been entirely successful.

It is possible, and indeed very probable, that Booth and his associates
were originally moved to become assassins by that sentiment which has
caused many other men to assail public characters, and sometimes with
the bloodiest success. This supposition does not exclude the action of
more eminent persons from the tragedy, who may have urged on those
hot-headed fools to the completion of their work. Booth was precisely
that sort of man who was likely to be the victim of the astounding
delusion that to kill President Lincoln would place him in history
alongside of those immortal tyrant-killers whose names are in most
people's mouths, and whose conduct is seldom condemned and very often is
warmly approved. There is constant praise going on of those who, in
classic times, put to death men who held, or who aspired to obtain,
improper power, or whose conduct was cruel. Booth thought that Mr.
Lincoln was a usurper, and that his conduct was cruel; and he could have
cited abundance of evidence from the speeches and writings of Northern
men, professing to be sound Unionists, in support of the position that
the President was a usurper and a tyrant. Having convinced himself that
such was the position, and character of the President, it was the most
natural thing in the world that he, a Southern man, and brought up on
those sensational tragedies in which human life is easily taken on all
occasions, should have jumped to the conclusion that it was his duty to
kill the man whose plan and actions he had so strangely misconceived.
If, while he was thus deluding himself with the notion that he was about
to rival Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and other Grecian foes of tyrants,
there came to him men who had too much sense