he self-denial to resign without a struggle. The wrong consists not in
the original delegation of the authority--for that is justified by the
highest of all laws, the law of self-preservation--but in its retention
and exercise, when the exigency no longer supports it.

Having parted with the authority to redress grievances, and provide for
protection and defence, the citizen can not at once recover it--it
remains for a time in the hands of the representative, and is always
difficult to regain. But it does not therefore follow, that he should
never intrust it to another, for the inconvenience sometimes resulting
from its delegation, is one of the incidents to human life, teaching,
not obstinacy or jealousy, but circumspection.

The following story, related by one who is well-acquainted with the
early history of this country, will illustrate the manner in which the
regulator system was sometimes made subservient to men's selfish
purposes; and there have, unhappily, been too many instances, in which
such criminal schemes were more successful than they were in this. I
have entitled it "The Stratagem."

THE STRATAGEM.

Robert Elwood emigrated from Kentucky to Illinois, about the year in
which the latter was erected into a state, and passing to the northwest
of the regions then occupied by the French and Virginians, pitched his
tent upon the very verge of the frontier. He was a man of violent
passions, impatient of the restraints of law--arrogant, overbearing, and
inclined to the use of "the strong-hand." His removal had been caused by
a difficulty with one of his neighbors, in which he had attempted to
right himself without an appeal to the legal tribunals. In this attempt,
he had not only been thwarted, but also made to pay rather roundly for
his temerity; and, vexed and soured, he had at once abandoned his old
name, and marched off across the prairies, seeking a country in which,
as he said, "a man need not meet a cursed constable every time he left
his own door." His family consisted of three sons and one daughter, the
latter being, at the time of his emigration, about sixteen years of age.

In journeying toward the north, he halted one day, at noon, within a
"point" of timber, which extended a mile into the prairie, and was
surrounded by as beautiful a piece of rolling meadow-land, as one need
wish to see. He was already half-a-day's journey beyond the thicker
settlements; and, indulging a reasonable hope tha