the court adjourned after ample securities being
given. The next day Fife was taken to jail for trading with negroes,
but has since been released on paying $100. The interference of Mr.
Kinney was wholly unnecessary; it was an assumption on his part which
properly belonged to our magistrates. Fife had agreed to go away, and
the matter would have been amicably settled but for him. We have no
unfriendly feelings towards Mr. Kinney: no personal animosities to
gratify: we have always considered him as one of our best lawyers. But
when he comes forth as the supporter of such a fellow as Fife, under
the plea that the laws have been violated--when he arraigns the acts
of thirty of the inhabitants of this place, it is high time for him to
reflect seriously on the consequences. The Penitentiary system is the
result of the refinement of the eighteenth century. As man advances in
the sciences, in the arts, in the intercourse of social and civilized
life, in the same proportion does crime and vice keep an equal pace,
and always makes demands on the wisdom of legislators. Now, what is
the Lynch law but the Penitentiary system carried out to its full
extent, with a little more steam power? or more properly, it is simply
thus: _There are some scoundrels in society on whom the laws take no
effect; the most expeditious and short way is to let a majority decide
and give them_ JUSTICE."

Let the reader notice, 1st, that this outrage was perpetrated with
great deliberation, and after it was over, the victim was commanded to
leave town by the next week: when that cooling interval had passed,
the outrage was again deliberately repeated. 2d. It was perpetrated by
"thirty persons,' "_the most respectable in the city_." 3d. That at
the second lynching of Fife, several of his neighbors who had gathered
to defend him, (seeing that all the legal officers in the city had
refused to do it, thus violating their oaths of office,) _were knocked
down_, to which the editor adds, with the business air of a
professional butcher, "nothing _serious_ occurred!" 4th. That not a
single magistrate in the city took the least notice either of the
barbarities inflicted upon Fife, or of the assaults upon his friends,
knocking them down, &c., but, as the editor informs us, all "seemed to
acquiesce in the proceedings." 5th. That this conduct of the
magistrates was well pleasing to the great mass of the citizens, is
plain, from the remark of the editor that "every o