"] The mob at Alton
were met to wrest from a citizen his just rights--met to resist the
laws. We have been told that our fathers did the same; and the glorious
mantle of Revolutionary precedent has been thrown over the mobs of our
day. To make out their title to such defence, the gentleman says that
the British Parliament had a right to tax these colonies. It is manifest
that, without this, his parallel falls to the ground, for Lovejoy
had stationed himself within constitutional bulwarks. He was not only
defending the freedom of the press, but he was under his own roof, in
arms with the sanction of the civil authority. The men who assailed him
went against and over the laws. The mob, as the gentleman terms it--mob,
forsooth! certainly we sons of the tea-spillers are a marvellously
patient generation!--the "orderly mob" which assembled in the Old
South to destroy the tea, were met to resist, not the laws, but illegal
enactions. Shame on the American who calls the tea tax and stamp act
laws! Our fathers resisted, not the King's prerogative, but the King's
usurpation.
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