ent, and there was no legal redress. Every attempt of the friends
of law and order to elect honest men to office was met at the polls by
vituperation and assault.

One of the means for thinning out the ranks of their opponents at the
polls they found very efficient. It was to scatter their "thugs" along
the line of waiting voters and known opposers, and quickly and covertly
inject the metal part of a shoemaker's awl in the rear but most fleshy
part of his adversary's anatomy, making sitting unpleasant for a time.
There was usually uncertainty as to the point of compass from which the
hint came to leave, but none as to the fact of its arrival. Hence the
reformer did not stand on the order of his going, but generally left the
line. These votes, of course, were not thrown out, for the reason they
never got in. It diminished, but did not abolish the necessity of
stuffing ballot boxes. In the West I once knew an old magistrate named
Scott, noted for his impartiality, but only called Judge Scott by
non-patrons of his court, who had never came within the purview of his
administration, to others he was known as "old Necessity," for it was
said he knew no law. Revolutions, the beneficial results of which will
ever live in the history of mankind, founded as they were on the rights
of human nature and desire for the establishment and conservation of
just government, have ever been the outgrowth of necessity.

Patient in protest of misgovernment, men are prone to "bear the ill they
have" until, like the accumulation of rills on mountain side,
indignation leaps the bounds of legal form and prostrate law to find
their essence and purpose in reconstruction. At the time of which I
write, there seemed nothing left for the friends of law, bereft as they
were of all statutary means for its enforcement, but making a virtue of
this necessity by organizing a "vigilance committee" to wrench by
physical strength that unobtainable by moral right. There had been no
flourish of trumpets, no herald of the impending storm, but the pent up
forces of revolution in inertion, now fierce for action, discarded
restraint. Stern, but quiet had been the preparation for a revolution
which had come, as come it ever will, with such inviting environments.
It was not that normal status, the usual frailties of human nature
described by Hooker as "stains and blemishes that will remain till the
end of the world, what form of government, soever, may take place, they