ly fear of sack and
pillage, act with energy and decision; and even then the struggle
between the army, supported by the National Guard and the Anarchist
faction of the barricades, was long balanced and doubtful: yet the party
of order in Paris itself constituted an overwhelming majority.

In America, New England perhaps excepted, the mob and the people, the
party of lawless force and law-abiding principle, meet on more equal
terms. No one dreams of disputing, in the last resort, the authority of
the Sovereign, but that Sovereign is invisible and inaccessible. It must
be remembered, moreover, that more than one of the hundred popular
risings, that the Union has seen during its hundred years' existence,
were risings, not against the law, but for the law against the laxity of
its administrators. This very fact makes it the more clear how uncertain
and ineffective is the authority of abstract law and an impersonal
Sovereign. The legal authorities, State or Federal, are not necessarily
representative of the power by which they are elected. In California,
after a period of anarchy, the respectable classes rose with the tacit
support of the people against the State Government which the people had
elected; deposed it almost without an effort, and established in its
place the arbitrary rule of a self-appointed Vigilance Committee, whose
members no one knew. That lawless Government hanged as many rowdies,
pilferers, highway robbers and card sharpers as it thought fit;
banished hundreds under penalty of death--a penalty sure to be
enforced--re-established order, and laid down its power without having
encountered the shadow of legal or popular resistance. We have seen an
actual insurrection of the better elements of society provoked by the
escape of murderers and other criminals through the hands of lax or
corrupt juries, and of an administration whose use of the prerogative of
mercy was imputed to partisanship or to bribery. But in a great majority
of instances, riots that have reached the proportions of insurrection
have been simply anarchical or rebellious. It is not so long since the
railway employes of Pennsylvania, striking work upon an every-day
quarrel between employer and employed, took possession of the iron
highways of the State, intercepted communication, seized the great
railway arsenal of Pittsburg, and fought a pitched battle against the
militia, as obstinate and almost as sanguinary as the minor combats of
the Civi