Daily Ohio statesman. [volume] (Columbus, Ohio) 1855-1870, 1864-01-26

1t is common saying that che who tells
one lie must tell twenty more to make that
one good" This proverb only expresses an
obvious truth that the commission Of one
crime involves sort of moral necessity for
the commission of others. He who yields
to temptation once, upon the pretext of ne
cessity, is apt to yield to it again upon a
similar pretext. The criminal necessity, to
which he first succumbed, grows stronger
and stronger, or at least he imagines 1t
does. Having once, twice or thrice cut
loose from the safe anchorage of conscious
unimpeachable virtue, he is driven forward
recklessly, by an imagined irresistible ne
cessity, to the lowest depths of moral in
fanny and ruin.
Experience teaches that this is true de-
scription Of the career of thousands Of men
in all conditions of social life, and from the
lowest to the highest positions in society
Numerous examples have been, and are al
ways to be found, in every country, in ev-
cry age, among rulers as well as among the
people. Men who, with apparently the
most honest intentions, yield to supposed
necessity of doing some great wrong to
achieve, as they imagine, a greater good,
r. become in the end the most abandoned and
reckless of criminals. Of this, men en-
trusted with power, who were supposed to
be most benevolent and honest, have Afford
cd some striking and terrible examples
Few of those men in power in former times,
whom the world now unites in calling
monsters, commenced their career other
than with the reputation of the purest hon
esty, the greatest benevolence and the lofti-
est patriotism. They yielded to q supposed
necessity of violating the constitutions and
laws of their respective countries, and be-
came the monsters they proved to be.
Step by step has the present Federal Ad-
ministration, or the President. who is its
head and responsible to the people for its
acts, gone on in this careerof imagined ne
cessity for violations of the National Con-
stitution and the constitutional rights of
the States and the people. One of these
violations begat, or was supposed to do so,
the necessity for another, and so on in an
endless chain, of which no man can see the
end. Usurpations of unconstitutional pow
CT in the case of individuals led to like
usurpations in the case of whole communi-
ties; unconstitutional assaults upon the
local institutions of particular States natur-
ally induced like assaults upon the States
themselves, and all from the plea of an in
exorable necessity-the same plea with
which the robber, the murderer or the mid
night assassin attempts to allay the stings
of an upbraiding conscience.
The longer the Administration, or the
President as its head perseveres in this
course, the more pressing and dimperious will
become the imagined necessity for more nu-
merous and more fragrant violations of the
Constitution and the rights and liberties of
the people. Having once swept away the
barriers of the Constitution and the old
landmarks of right and wrong, there is no
stopping place anywhere for ABRAHAM LIN
coin and his Administration in his and its
career toward anarchy and ruin. The de-
mon of necessity, which has taken full
possession of him and his partisans, has
made him and them, in moral and politi-
cal sense, drunk and mad, and goads them
on to make the work of devastation and
ruin they have begun complete.