ABSTRACT
I BELIEVE there is no man, however he may stand affected to the public cause, who will not acknowledge that this country owes every advantage it has lately obtained, to the interposition of the people. – But there are some, who, though they will acknowledge this, and the importance of those advantages, and that every ordinary mode of procuring them had before been repeatedly tried without effect, will yet condemn the conduct of the people in having had recourse, in the last instance, to the only means it appears by which those advantages could possibly have been obtained. They admit that the interposition of the people has in its consequences been eminently useful, but at the same time they assert that it is in itself unconstitutional. A melancholy contradiction indeed, if it were really to exist, between what is materially conducive to the public welfare, and what is consonant to the spirit of the Constitution. – But with what arguments, or by what authority, do they support their assertion? – Surely it is not on weak or superficial grounds they asperse the conduct of the people. – They too who exclaim so pathetically against unsupported popular abuse, and the unjustifiable licentiousness of the press. – From them at least we may expect, that as in their conduct they have not, it must be confessed, exhibited in themselves / what they reprehend in others, so in their censure they will not be found, like the multitude they condemn, to have been rash, uncandid, or intemperate, but if they must disapprove, that their disapprobation will have been the result of just and dispassionate reflection, expressed with moderation, and grounded upon solid and conclusive reasoning. Yet in what manner do they reason? Do they define with accuracy the limits of the Constitution, and then prove, after diligent research, that within those limits there is no instance to be found of the interposition of the people? or do they collect its general spirit from a liberal construction of different constitutional precedents, and then prove, that there is no essential analogy between the present and preceding interpositions? No – they support their former assertion by again asserting, and in like general language, “that the truth of the position is sufficiently demonstrated by the fact, that already all good government is at an end, that all subordination is destroyed, that the people do as they please, that we are governed by an armed mob, and that the country must 66finally be undone, if the declarations of the volunteers are any longer suffered to influence the decisions of the legislature.”8
