Clarksville chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 186?-1872, 1869-05-22
LIBERTY SECURED BY LAW.


When we reflect, says the National
Intelligencer, upon the amazing trials
and sufferings through which our an
cestors, the people of England, passed,
and all that they endured in creating
civilization, and, step by step and
age by age, obtaining for themselves
and their posterity liberty secured by
law; and when we turn our eyes from
their struggles and their ever-glorious
triumphs to what is now going on
among as, their children, inheriting,
as we did, the priceless benefactions
of their blood, the mind is filed with
wonder and the heart sickened at the
contrast-a contrast which reveals,
gloriously and grandly to them, how
our ancestors priced the freedom they
had won, and lamentably reveals how
little pe value it, and now carelessly
we stand by, with feelings calm as
summer airs, and see 1t insidiously
undermined and in process of being
overthrown. Perhaps it is because
we have not had our thousand years
Of pupilage in freedomless probation,
as the English people had, and have
never felt for ourselves what it is to
rise up, by slow and heart-burning
degrees, from serfdom to supremacy
toovercome halfsavage combinations
and powers, with their attending OPP
pressions and wrongs; by patient en-
durance and heroic effort TO tread ty-
rants and tyrannies in the old time,
and of the worst sort, under our feet,
and stand up superior to both; and
out of the materials which such times
and such conflicts farnish, shape civ
ilzation, give direction, for present
and future generations, to the nobler
instincts and aspirations of men, and
establish ourselves in freedom. This
did the English people. For doing
this, peans to their glory have been
sung by the human race, and the
English nation wreathed with gar
lands that shall never wither.-
They, as a people, began in barbarism
and despotism, and rose up to liberty
secured by law. We, as people, be-
gan in liberty secured by law, and are
tending-wither? To the destruction
of all that England won, and that
we, with our views, made more per-
feet. England maintains her ground,
her people enjoy all the bless
ings which law can give that they ever
had, and are year by year multiplying
them and charging the scope of their
benficient influences; and, all in all,
they are to day the happiest people
under heaven.
How Is it with us? Can we say
as much for ourselves? Do the
American people possess to-day all
the benefits and immunities that they
once had, and which wholesome laws:
laws which were supposed to be the
Capitalization of all past experience
and proved principles for the happi-
ness and welfare of mankind--gave
to them? In sorrow we repiy-dis-
heartening and indisputable facts re-
ply-far, far from it. And further
more, what is worse still, have they
not in a great measure lost not only
the liberty that law gave them, but
have they not also lost, or are fast
losing, the political tain which, as
the ali-in-all to them, on which those
laws are founded, and from which
they derive their vitality? 1t is inn
possible to conceal-and it Is better
so, for 1t is important to expose and
make plain the truth-that a great
and melancholy change has come
over the spirit of the country; not so
much, perhaps-we should hope So
over the spirit of the great mass of
the people, but among those who in
politics of lateyears have been upper
most, and who have directed the pops
ular ideas and moulded them in a
wrong and ruinous direction. This is
a bad augury, when leaders, forsak-
ing the chart which experience and
precedents have given them, wilfully
depart, and with no light to guide
them but the ignis fatuus oftheir own
heated imaginations, from the beaten
pathway of the past, turning aside to
go wither they know not, and en-
deavor to lure the people with them.
The fruits of these side-wanderings
through unknown ways, and these
influences brought to bear upon the
masses, are visible all around u.s.
The public mind isperplexed and un-
settled. There is little real peace and
contentment in our midst. There is
a busy, restless something that make
the popular pulse feverish and inreg-
ular, and the popular, mind anything
but calm and reconciled TO its condi-
ton. There is alienation, and the
people, not only in widely-separate
sections, but in the same sections, are
not hand and heart together, laboring
for common ends and for the welfare
of the common country, rs they used
to be. Explain il as we please, we
cannot explainit away, and there is no
doubtaboutit. To the most Thought
less observer, or the wayfaring man, il
is obvious. What is 10 be done? What
is there within our reach that can
.,ini.lnr In o nnlllln mind lls.nAnl IL