by committing all sorts of depredations,
fraud, and violence against the community at large. So (not to speak it
profanely) some of Mr. Croker's friends may be very respectable people
in their way--'all honourable men'--but their respectability is confined
within party limits; every one does not sympathise in the integrity of
their views; the understanding between them and the public is not
well defined or reciprocal. Or, suppose a gang of pickpockets hustle
a passenger in the street, and the mob set upon them, and proceed to
execute summary justice upon such as they can lay hands on, am I to
conclude that the rogues are in the right, because theirs is a system
of well-organised knavery, which they settled in the morning, with their
eyes one upon the other, and which they regularly review at night, with
a due estimate of each other's motives, character, and conduct in the
business; and that the honest men are in the wrong, because they are a
casual collection of unprejudiced, disinterested individuals, taken at
a venture from the mass of the people, acting without concert or
responsibility, on the spur of the occasion, and giving way to their
instantaneous impulses and honest anger? Mobs, in fact, then, are almost
always right in their feelings, and often in their judgments, on this
very account--that being utterly unknown to and disconnected with each
other, they have no point of union or principle of co-operation between
them, but the natural sense of justice recognised by all persons in
common. They appeal, at the first meeting, not to certain symbols and
watchwords privately agreed upon, like Freemasons, but to the maxims and
instincts proper to all the world. They have no other clue to guide them
to their object but either the dictates of the heart or the universally
understood sentiments of society, neither of which are likely to be in
the wrong. The flame which bursts out and blazes from popular sympathy
is made of honest but homely materials. It is not kindled by sparks of
wit or sophistry, nor damped by the cold calculations of self-interest.
The multitude may be wantonly set on by others, as is too often the
case, or be carried too far in the impulse of rage and disappointment;
but their resentment, when they are left to themselves, is almost
uniformly, in the first instance, excited by some evident abuse and
wrong; and the excesses into which they run arise from that very want
of foresight and regular system w