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It is a peculiarity of women that they are not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily into such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to snuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that would cause a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off mobocracy and safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this sniffing.
The first of these was the impeachment of Judge Pickering of the New Hampshire District Court, which was suggested by the President on the 3d of February and voted by the House on the 18th of February; the other was an address which Justice Chase delivered on the 2d of May to a Baltimore grand jury, assailing the repeal of the Judiciary Act and universal suffrage and predicting the deterioration of "our republican Constitution... into a mobocracy, the worst of all possible governments." * Considering the fact that the President was still smarting from the Chief Justice's lash and also that Chase himself was more heartily detested by the Republicans than any other member of the Supreme Bench, nothing could have been more untimely than this fresh judicial excursion into the field of "manners and morals," and partisan malice was naturally alert to interpret it as something even more offensive.
"Brydges, this country is rapidly lining up two opposing sides: fighting lines, too, by George! Mobocracy versus Plutocracy! I'm only a cog in the wheel, myself, a mere marker for the big counters, my boy; but if I have to put up with the tyranny of one or t'other, I'm damned if I don't prefer the tyranny of the rich to the tyranny of the poor, any day!
Garrison has preserved for us an instructive account of this affair, too, and here is the story as told by him to his brother-in-law, George W. Benson, in a letter dated May 25th: "The spirit of mobocracy, like the pestilence, is contagious; and Boston is once more ready to reënact the riotous scenes of 1835.
In England there were no breaks in the ranks of the king's supporters; in America the office-holding class, the "best families," the people of settled income and vested rights, were as a rule, selfishly or unselfishly, for the king. Already "mobocracy," "the faction," "sedition," were familiar terms among them.
The mobocracy are "all for a muss," of course, as they always are till they see the glitter of bayonets; but I cannot believe that the bellicose ideas they are so fond of mooting have ever been seriously entertained by the Government.
Meredith's contempt for what he styled the "mobocracy," his first question concerned the meeting. "A pooty mess yer've made of it, Meredith," growled Mr. Hennion. "I!" cried the squire, indignantly. "'T is naught I had to do with it." "An' 't is thet 'ere keepin' away dun the harm," scolded the elder Hennion. "Swamp it, yer let the hotheads control!
It was Bradford's design to seize Fort Pitt and its arms and ammunition; but he found most of the militia officers unwilling to co-operate in such an overt act of treason. But they readily consented to the perpetration of outrages against excise officers, and the whole country in that region was governed, for the moment, by the combined powers of mobocracy and military despotism.
The loud, preposterous moral crusades that so endlessly rock the republic against the rum demon, against Sunday baseball, against Sunday moving-pictures, against dancing, against fornication, against the cigarette, against all things sinful and charming these astounding Methodist jehads offer fat clinical material to the student of mobocracy.
The whole nation to-day is divided on fundamentals. I'm no mealy mouth to curse plutocracy in order to please the mob. Plutocracy fills the workman's dinner pail and keeps the mills going and opens the mines and builds the railroads. Mobocracy, your grubby corn cob and trashy roses, that, what does it do? Mouthe and mouthe and try to pull down what is above it! It will have to be fought out! No?
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