and rushed to arms.

The arguments of the Council Chamber and the House of Representatives
preceded and sanctioned the contest. To draw the argument of our
ancestors into a precedent for mobs, for a right to resist laws we
ourselves have enacted, is an insult to their memory. The difference
between the excitements of those days and our own, which the gentleman
in kindness to the latter has overlooked, is simply this: the men of our
day went for the right as secured by the laws. They were the people
rising to sustain the laws and constitution of the Province. The rioters
of our day go for their own wills, right or wrong. Sir, when I heard the
gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by
side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those
pictured lips[33] would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant
American, the slanderer of the dead. The gentleman said that he should
sink into insignificance if he dared to gainsay the principles of these
resolutions. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil consecrated
by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should
have yawned and swallowed him up.

The gentleman says Lovejoy was presumptuous and imprudent, he "died as
the fool dieth." And a reverend clergyman of the city tells us that no
citizen has a right to publish opinions disagreeable to the community!
If any mob follows such publication on him rests the guilt. He must wait
forsooth till the people come up to it and agree with him. This libel on
liberty goes on to say that the want of right to speak as we think is an
evil inseparable from republican institutions. If this be so what are
they worth? Welcome the despotism of the Sultan where one knows what he
may publish and what he may not, rather than the tyranny of this
many-headed monster the mob, where we know not what we may do or say
till some fellow-citizen has tried it and paid for the lesson with his
life. This clerical absurdity chooses as a check for the abuses of the
press, not the law but the dread of the mob. By so doing it deprives not
only the individual and the minority of their rights, but the majority
also, since the expression of their opinion may sometimes provoke
disturbance from the minority. A few men may make a mob as well as many.
The majority then have no right as Christian men, to utter their
sentiments if by any possibility it may lead to a mob. Shades of Hugh
Peters and Jo