rted, and restore
domestic peace, should, at the same time, create and foster those very
means that carry idleness, and ignorance, and vice, and nakedness, and
starvation, and discord into all ranks of society; that make widows and
orphans, that sow the seeds of disease and death among us; that strike,
indeed, at the foundation of all that is good and great.

You create paupers, and lodge them in your alms house--orphans, and give
them a residence in your asylum--convicts, and send them to the
penitentiary. You seduce men to crime, and then arraign them at the bar
of justice--immure them in prison. With one hand you thrust the dagger
to the heart--with the other attempt to assuage the pain it causes.

We all remember to have heard, from the lips of our parents, the
narration of the fact, that in the early history of our country, the
tomahawk and scalping-knife were put into the hands of our savage
neighbors, by our enemies at war, and that a bounty was awarded for the
depredations they committed on the lives of our defenceless
fellow-citizens. Our feelings were shocked at the recital, and a
prejudice was created, as well to these poor wandering savages, as to
the nation that prompted them to the work, which neither time nor
education has eradicated. Yet, as merciless and savage as this practice
may appear to us, it was Christian, it was humane, compared with ours:
theirs sought only the life-blood, and that of their enemies; ours seeks
the blood of souls, and that of our own citizens, and friends, and
neighbors. Their avarice was satiated with a few inches of the scalp,
and the death inflicted was often a sudden and easy one; ours produces a
death that lingers: and not content with the lives of our
fellow-citizens, it rifles their pockets. It revels in rapine and
robbery; it sacks whole towns and villages; it lays waste fields and
vineyards; it riots on domestic peace, and virtue, and happiness; it
sets at variance the husband and the wife; it causes the parent to
forsake the child, and the child to curse the parent; it tears asunder
the strongest bonds of society; it severs the tenderest ties of nature.

And who is the author of all this; and where lies the responsibility? I
appeal to my fellow-citizens.

Are not we the authors? Does not the responsibility rest upon us? Is it
not so?

The power emanates from us; we delegate it to the constituted
authorities, and we say to them, "Go on; cast firebrands, arrows, and