The Ashland union. [volume] (Ashland, Ashland County, Ohio) 1854-1868, 1857-08-12
The GREAT Prevalence Of Crime.-.-
Its Cause.

Hts Cau9es
The results of the stand taken by the
Republican Press in refusing to submit
to the laws of the land and the decisions
of the highest judicial tribunals If the
governments are arousing the feelings OF
the people to a high degree. Vigilance
committees, mobs and crime are holding
high festival throughout the country,
aided and encouraged by the thousands
Of fats that are continually emanating
from the Republican p Tess, urging op-
position to the officers of the law and
denouncing the opponents of its princi-
pies.
The newspaper annals of the last year
present the most appalling and startling
record of crimes in the United States
that has cursed our country since the
period of our first existance as a govern
ment. The ordinary means used for its
prevention seem to have almost entirely
failed. The mania spreads, and from the
priest-ridden sod of Massachusetts, to
the wild frontiers of Kansas, from the
dwelling place of the proverbially cool
and calculating Northerner, to the plan
tation of the hot blooded Southerner,
rolls back and forth, gathering as it goes,
a stream of criminality, inhuman and
revolving, as if the very fountains of
morality were corrupted with a malaria
of hostility to the established rules of
society, and a fixed determination to
break down all the barriers of social and
moral rectitude
Why this defiance of the law and dis
regard of its enactments :? Why is it
that men murder and ihobs assemble I?
An easy, plain and just solution of these
questions is found by reference to the
columns Of the Black Republican press.
There we find advocated resistance to
law, there we see the judicial ermine. in
its highest aud most sacred places, de-
uounced, and there we see heralded as
heroes, men who boldly and openly resist
the officers of the Federal government in
the legitimate discharge of their duties.
Their papers TEEN With the sensdess jar
gon of egotistic fools, who with an impu-
dence, righteousness and assumption on
ly equaled by that of the ass that tried
to palm himself off for a philosopher,
but without the sense he had, to keep
still, attempt to show that the decisions
Of the Supreme Court of the United
States are not founded on law and The
''milk and water" resolutions of petty
conventions condemning the party and
the peOfle that acquiescc in its decis
ions, and articles invoking upon our in
stitutions, aud administrative officers
all kinds of misfortune and evil. True,
they do not say that all crimes are right
and that the laws for punishment of
criminals are Unconstitutional, unjust,
and should be resisted but jumping
directly Upon the "higher law platform
of the Abolitionists, they say that GER
tain laws and decisions which they do
chance to like are wrong and that
their enforcement should be obstructed.
Why then can not tho assassin or the
thief justify his course in the same man
ner. If every man has this higher law
right of being his own judge of the law,
of disregarding it whenever hisinterests
or his whims so dictat,, what security
is there in government? Robbers may
band together, claim that the law for
heir punishment is ''unconstitutional,"
and commit their crimes with IMMUNITY.
The murderer may set up for a defence
upon his trial, that this ''higher law"
condemns capital punishment as a wrong
an outrage upon the ncchS of sue
as himself, and, according to
heir doctrine, go ''unwhipped of jus
1t is the inculcatio1 of such a belief
as this into the minds of the weak and
that is causing this startling in
crease of crime that daily fills the col
lmns of papers with its revolving and
IOTElUic OOtdlAc Ia nbIC d pOffC-lui
md unprincipled press, for political pur-
,oses, continues to advocate infamous
nd open resistance to legal cnactments
Id judicial decisions, we la expect l
hat the ignorant and depraved will take :
.dvantage of it's encouragement and COM :
nit their depredations under it's sane |
ion. One of the strongest proofs that
he present unparalleled frequency of
hese outrages is the result of this sane
ion and encouragement. is found in the ,
act that they have only thus increased =
this Republican party have been $
'romulgating their destructive and dan
,erous doctrines of resistance to the laws f
# the land.
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