lly 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, if no pernicious
example be set by it, is never matter of reasonable regret with any
one. If they were annually swept from the stage of existence by the
plague or small-pox, honest men would perhaps be much profited by the
operation.--Similar too is the correct reasoning in regard to the
burning of the negro at St. Louis. He had forfeited his life by the
perpetration of an outrageous murder upon one of the most worthy and
respectable citizens of the city, and had he not died as he did, he
must have died by the sentence of the law in a very short time
afterwards. As to him alone, it was as well the way it was as it could
otherwise have been. But the example in either case was fearful. When
men take it in their heads to-day to hang gamblers or burn murderers,
they should recollect that in the confusion usually attending such
transactions they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is
neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is, and that, acting upon
the example they set, the