that fate shall permit the world to know.

"This task, gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to
posterity--all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

"How, then, shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the
approach of danger?

"Shall we expect some trans-Atlantic military giant to step the ocean
and crush us at a blow?

"Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa, combined, with all
the treasures of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest,
with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from
the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand
years.

"At what point, then, is this approach of danger to be expected?

"I answer, if ever it reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot
come from abroad.

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and
finisher.

"As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by
suicide.

"I hope I am not over-wary; but, if I am not, there is even now
something of ill-omen amongst us.

"I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country, the
disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of
the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the
executive ministers of justice.

"This disposition is awfully fearful in any community, and that it now
exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit it, it would be
a violation of truth and an insult to deny.

"Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the
times.

"They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are
neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning sun
of the latter.

"They are not the creatures of climate, neither are they confined to the
slave-holding or non-slave-holding States.

"Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting Southerners and the
order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits.

"Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.

"Many great and good men, sufficiently qualified for any task they may
undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing
beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or Presidential chair; but
such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.

"What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, or a
Napoleon? Never!

"Towering genius disdains a