r yet preserved abodes, the
noble mothers who adorned the days of our early independence are
vividly remembered realities and not haunting shades--the
descendants of earnest seekers for liberty, civil and religious, of
rare races, grown great in heroic endurance, in purity which comes
of trial borne, and in hope born of conscious right, whom the wheels
of fortune sent hither to transmit such virtues--the descendants
of these have no heart, no ear for the diabolisms born in hotbeds of
tyranny and intolerance. No descendant of these--no woman of this
temperate land--could have seen, much less joined, her son,
descending the sanguinary and irrepassable ways of treason and
murder to an ignominious death, or an expatriated and attainted
life, worse than the punishing wheel and bloody pool of the poets'
hell.

In our country, where reason and moderation so easily quench the
fires of insane hate, and where the vendetta is so easily overcome
by the sublime grace of forgiveness, no woman could have been found
so desperate as to sacrifice all spiritual, temporal, and social
good, self, offspring, fame, honor, and all the desiderata of life,
and time, and immortality, to the commission, or even countenance,
of such a deed of horror, as we have been compelled to contemplate
during the two months past.

In a Christian land, where all records and results of the world's
intellectual, civil, and moral advancement mold the human heart and
mind to highest impulses, the theory of old Helvetius is more
probable than desirable.

The natures of all born in equal station are not so widely varied as
to present extremes of vice and goodness, but by the effects of rarest
and severest experience. Beautiful fairies and terrible gnomes do not
stand by each infant's cradle, sowing the nascent mind with tenderest
graces or vilest errors. The slow attrition of vicious associations
and law-defying indulgences, or the sudden impetus of some terribly
multiplied and social disaster, must have worn away the susceptibility
of conscience and self-respect, or dashed the mind from the height of
these down to the depths of despair and recklessness, before one of
ordinary life could take counsel with violence and crime. In no such
manner was the life of our client marked. It was the parallel of
nearly all the competent masses. Surrounded by the scenes of her
earliest recollections, independent in her condition she was satisfied
with the _mundus_ of he