Page:History of Delaware County (1856).djvu/316

 292 HISTORY OP are demanded alike by patriotic feeling, moral duty, and a plain sense of personal justice; and especially, if any one among their number, holding a public trust, and resting under the obligations of that oath, shall become lost to a just sense of his duty to himself and his State, and shall yield to the insurrectionary influences around him, it is incumbent upon them, while they boldly detect and expose and bring to justice the delinquent, to show by their better conduct and example, that our free institutions are not to be surrendered for a state of disorder, and violence, and crime, and murder, even though some few of their constituted guardians should not be proof against such delusion. " To the freemen of the State I can make no stronger appeal than is presented in the simple narration of facts I have set forth. These facts show the regular progress to its result in crime and blood of every attempt to set aside the regularly constituted tribunals of civil society, organized for the protec- tion of personal rights and the redress of personal wrongs, — to make might the measure of right between citizen and citizen. Masks and disguises are never assumed to protect men in the performance of acts toward their neighbors, which the judg- ment and the conscience approve ; and no other acts will pro- mote the peace, order or prosperity of society, or the happiness, or true interest of him who performs the action. Secret oaths are only administered to add to the protection of the masks, when the conscience proclaims that he who is trusted to look behind the mask may be as dangerous as he who looks upon it ; that the danger is in the truth, and is to be apprehended from all who can tell it. When the mind becomes so deluded as to rely upon protections like these, and to act from the prompt- ings which a sense of security of this character, if indulged, will never fail to engender, high crimes are the certain fruit, and the charm of the protection vanishes only when the guilt is incurred. The intelligent freemen of our State will not