"To obtain a proper knowledge of the United States, it is necessary to remain a long time in the country; to visit various parts of the Union; to make acquaintance with all classes of men; to compare their ideas with results daily occurring, and to lay aside all partiality. Of late travellers, Stuart is the only one who has seen the necessity of pursuing this line of conduct, in order to form a correct judg ment of the country; and his Three Years in America,' is a work abounding in interesting facts, and composed after a long residence, which enabled him to consider every object coolly and impartially. Of other descriptions of North America, it can only be said, that Hall's book was a political confession, Mrs. Trollope's a mercantile speculation, Hamilton's a criticism on a republican form of government, and Fidler's an effusion of disappointed hopes."

Mr. Arfwedson's book is unquestionably one of the best that have yet appeared on this country, and he peculiarly deserves the praise he has himself bestowed upon Mr. Stuart. The work moreover should interest Americans, since it is written by a republican Swede, who seems to have few national prejudices, and who could have no private views, either in the disparagement or the praise, of our customs and institutions. There are every where marks of a man who closely observes, and calmly reasons, and who is evidently a scholar and a gentleman. It is also greatly to his credit, that he should have been able, in his travels through this country, to converse fluently with the people in their own language, and afterwards write his book in that language. His style is sometimes stiff, but it is never obscure, and on the whole is agreeable and unaffected.

He thus speaks of the duration of the present form of the Constitution of the United States:

"I am not a candidate for the honour of predicting the destiny of North America, still less do I believe it in human power to anticipate the future effect of so liberal a Constitution as the American, tested only by a few half scores of years; but I venture to affirm, that, without being perfect, it is of all Constitutions, ancient and modern, the one which has approached nearest to the object in view. North Ame rica is happy and free under the form of government which it now possesses, and may with calmness look forward to the future.”

They who look forward to the future should also look back to the past. Its dim records present but one picture of change, of decay, and of overthrow. The advantages of a free government, where the laws are equitable, and the people contented, have often been enjoyed, but have never been appreciated. Political liberty has always degenerated into political license, and the means that were best contrived to promote human happiness, have been a fruitful source of human misery.

"Infelici gli uomini! Senza principj chiari ed immobili che li guidino, errano smarriti e fluttuanti nel vasto mare delle opinioni; passano il momento presente sempre amareggiato dalla incertezza del futuro; privi dei durevoli piaceri della tranquillità e sicurezza, appena alcuni pochi di essi, sparsi quà e là nella trista loro vita, con fretta e con disordine divorati, li consolano di esser vissuti.”

ART. IX.-MOB LAW.

1.-Report of the Committee relating to the Destruction of the Ursuline Convent. August 11, 1834.

2.-Trial of John R. Buzzell, before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, for Arson and Burglary in the Ursuline Convent at Charlestown. Reported by C. PICKERING ESQ., the Reporter of the Court.

3.Trial of William Mason, Marvin Marcy Jr., and Sargent Blaisdell, charged with being concerned in burning the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, on the night of the 11th of August, 1834.

4.-Argument of James T. Austin, Attorney-General of the Commonwealth, before the Supreme Judicial Court in Middlesex, on the case of John R. Buzzell, one of the twelve individuals charged with being concerned in destroying the Ursuline Convent at Charlestown. Reported verbatim by the Stenographer of the Atlas.

THE years 1833 and 1834 will be remarkable in the annals of our country for disregard of the laws, and illegal violence to persons and property. A tendency to substitute popular will for public law has discovered itself in the highest and the humblest classes of the community; and the example of the former will not escape the censure of having seduced the latter.

In no country should the supremacy of the law, and its administration through the regularly constituted organs, be so earnestly cherished, as in this: for the law is the sovereign of the country-the great, efficient, and only safe representative of the people. The laws rule, and the people are parties to the laws; and in these principles lies the only practicable state of civil liberty. If the laws cease to rule, or the people undertake to administer them by any other than legitimately constituted means, the barriers to anarchy and subsequent despotism are removed. Whilst the laws are respected, and the citizen is zealous to enforce obedience to them, the enjoyment of personal security and of property is absolute and uninterrupted; the civil power, strong in that respect and zeal, restrains our evil passions and performs the office of armed cohorts, which are indispensable to maintain the order of society, where despotic power prevails. But remove the efficient force which respect and zeal for the law produce-suffer the people in primary and irresponsible and local assemblies, to judge offences and to become the executors of their own decrees, and at once the bonds of society are loosened, the wants and the passions of the moment will seek the speediest means of gratification and prescribe the forms of execution. In such a state there

is no security for property or life; and from this worst of uncertainties, military despotism, however stern, is a peaceful asylum. To this state we have said there is a tendency.

Portions of the people deem themselves truly sovereign within their respective localities, and proceed to enact laws, which they proclaim only in their execution, but which they do not deign to define either as to the extent of prohibition, or the nature of punishment.

Thus, when the philanthropists of New York, in the universality of their benevolence, essay to break simultaneously the chains of all the negro slaves in the Union, and to elevate the gentlemen and ladies of colour to an equality with the whites, at bed and board, the sovereign mob, at their primary assemblies at the Five Points," and at other equally dignified places, proclaim such essay an offence, alike enormous in the agent and the patients, worthy to be punished by the razing of their houses and their churches to the ground, the destruction, or confiscation to the use of the lawgivers, of their goods and chattels, and the infliction of violence upon their persons; and in the plenitude of their power, extend their infliction to the whole city, for having tolerated the offenders, causing for some days two hundred thousand persons to feel apprehension for their properties and their lives.

Thus, a pious divine of Newark, N. J., having proclaimed his intention to preach against the sin of slavery, in the fourth Presbyterian Church of that city, the sovereign people assembled in their primary meeting around the church, to the number of one thousand or more, decreed the sermon an offence contra bonos mores; and, emulous of the fame of their brethren of New York, proceed with praiseworthy discrimination and admirable justice, to the infliction of punishment; first by seeking to injure a wretched black, the only one in the congregation; secondly, by expelling the congregation from the church; thirdly, by demolishing the edifice; and fourthly, by the pursuit of the reverend doctor, who fortunately escaped until he could propitiate the sovereign by a public declaration, that since God, of the blacks and whites respectively, male and female created he them, he, the doctor, deemed it "a duty to keep the colours separate, and not to allow intermarriages among them."

Thus, the sovereign people of the city of Brotherly Love, not to be surpassed in the exercise of sovereign power, by the sovereigns of neighbouring cities, resolved, not only to emulate but to excel them in the nice discriminations of justice. Not having in the city any organized congregations of universal abolitionists, or if there be any, not knowing where to find them, and having no experimenters for human improvement by an amalgamation of all the grades and colours of humanity, they deemed them

selves righteously employed, for any cause or no cause at all, to assail the free blacks, to burn and pull down their houses and their churches, to rob them of their dearly purchased earnings, and to beat them to death. The like spirit of justice, as wisely displayed, also exhibited itself in the interior of Pennsylvania; and the borough of Columbia, on the Susquehanna, enrolled itself among the dispensators of popular laws, by the persecution of the wretched blacks.

So, portions of the sovereign people in the cities of Philadelphia and New York, undertake to maintain the purity and universality of popular suffrage, by expelling, with force of arms, all who differ from them in opinion, from the polls, destroying lives, and burning the dwellings not only of their opponents, but also of citizens who are not engaged in the contest.

So, at Natchez, a wretch charged with the murder of his wife, having been acquitted, after a formal trial, by the court, was seized, upon his discharge from prison, by a mob composed of the most respectable citizens of Natchez and the surrounding country, taken to the edge of the town, and there stripped and scourged with one hundred and fifty lashes; inflicted, however, by none but gentlemen of good standing, and afterwards tarred and feathered, and driven through the city with beat of drum, followed by a crowd of one thousand citizens, who poured curses upon his head.

So, in a remote county of Missouri, upon the verge of civilization, whither the ignorant and fanatic Mormonites had fled from the gibes and jeers of their better instructed neighbours, the sovereign freemen, assuming the power to proscribe such articles of religious faith as suit not their taste, attempt, by force of arms, to reform the creed, or to expel the new comers from the lands, which, in reliance upon natural rights, the constitution and the laws, they had honourably purchased and improved. But the Mormonite does not reject the use of arms, and is as ready to prove the divine origin of his faith as was St. Stephen, Bartholomew, Servetus, the adorer of Juggernaut, or any other zealot, who has sought the crown of martyrdom. Resistance produced civil war the obvious and immediate consequence of the illegal assumption of power of one portion of the people over another, and after much destruction of property and life, the whole people, the truly sovereign people, through their rightful organ the legis lature, are prayed to repair the injuries which illegal and presumptuous violence had inflicted.

Whilst we write, another instance of the workings of this spirit, so destructive of all the ends of political and civil association, is presented to our pen. A justice of the peace at Albany, having married an Irish girl to a Negro, but without knowing, as he asserts, that the girl was white, a mob seized the Justice, and

blackened his face in token of their displeasure. The act of the Justice, even in its worst light, was not unlawful, and however his aiding in the unseemly and revolting amalgamation of colours, may be reprehended, it is not by acts of personal violence inflicted by excited and lawless mobs, that the morals of the country, major or minor, are to be preserved. There are other and better modes by which such aberrations may be corrected. The censure of the press, and of orderly and respectable citizens, who frown indignantly upon the offenders, is all sufficient for the correction of the offenders. If it be not, let the offence be proscribed by law, and the offender duly punished after a fair trial and conviction.

But Charlestown, Massachusetts, has offered the most memorable instance of the disposition of the people to take into their own hands the direct regulation of the affairs of the country, to dispense with the cumbrous and expensive intermediates of legislators and judges, and to attempt to preserve the purity of their religious faith, by an act of intolerance which would have added new trophies to the reign of a Mary, or to the zeal of the overheated disciples of Calvin. To an account and discussion of this last subject, we purpose to appropriate the remainder of this article.

The Order of Ursuline Nuns was first established in the year 1536, for the purposes of administering relief to the sick and afflicted, and of superintending the education of female youth. It takes its name from the foundress St. Ursula. So exemplary have been the character and deportment of its members, and so beneficial its services in the cause of education and Christian charity, that when other religious orders of females were abolished by many of the European governments, this was not only permitted, but sustained.

Unlike other religious orders, whose members, renouncing the pleasures with the duties of the world, devote themselves to seclusion avowedly religious, the Ursulines, by the rules of the order and their vows, are engaged in the service of humanity, which subjects them to public observation, and exposes their personal deportment and the character of their institution to the strictest scrutiny. Whatever jealousy or suspicion, therefore, might be generated towards religious orders shrouded in the obscurity which they cast about them and which separates them from the occupations, enjoyments, and sympathies of society, and removes them from the observation of civil officers and responsibility to the civil law, there could be no rational cause of enmity towards an institution whose members were openly engaged in the offices of charity, in the presence of the world; who might abandon their order at pleasure, and whose dwellings, generally filled with those who are not members of the community, are acces