it is common to the whole country.

It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of
them. Those happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis are
perhaps the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity. In the
Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers--a
set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or
very honest occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by
the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the Legislature passed but
a single year before. Next, negroes suspected of conspiring to raise an
insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State;
then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally,
strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business, were in
many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of
hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and
from these to strangers, till dead men were seen literally dangling
from the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost
sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery
of the forest.

Turn then to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim
only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps
the most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever been
witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized
in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree,
and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time
he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with
the world.

Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more
and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and
order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to
attract anything more than an idle remark.

But you are perhaps ready to ask, "What has this to do with the
perpetuation of our political institutions?" I answer, It has much to
do with it. Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but
a small evil, and much of its danger consists in the proneness of
our minds to regard its direct as its only consequences. Abstractly
considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg was of but little
consequence. They constitute a portion of population that is worse than
useless in any community; and their death, i