We
have heard it asserted here, in Faneuil Hall, that Great Britain had a
right to tax the colonies, and we have heard the mob at Alton, the
drunken murderers of Lovejoy, compared to those patriot fathers who
threw the tea overboard. Fellow-citizens, is this Fanueil Hall doctrine?
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 defense 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
marvelously patient generation!--the "orderly mob" which assembled in
the Old South to destroy the tea were met to resist, not the laws,--but
illegal exactions.
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