A Picture of the Federal Congress.
--The Baltimore Exchange, in an editorial upon Trumbull's bill of abominations, styled an amended bill ‘"to suppress insurrection and sedition, and for other purposes,"’ says:‘ The most malignant Jacobians of the Constituent Assembly, the Robespierres, St Just, Barreres, Couthons, and their followers, have their prototypes in the present Congress of the United States. In that mad Carnival of radical Republicans, when a harlot was adored as the Goddess of Reason, and every law, whether human or divine, was set at defiance — all the blood that was shed and all the wickedness that was perpetrated was done — in the name of the people. Marat invoked the people, when he demanded the heads of ten thousand aristocrats. The cold, malignant Robespierre can ted of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." The sanguinary Fauquier Tinville doomed his innumerable victims to the guillotine, that the land might be purged of traitors to the Republic, "one and indivisible." The ferocious Carrier choked the waters of Loire with corpses on the plea that it was necessary to "sustain the Government." The Anglo Saxon writ of habeas corpus was unknown to France, or it would have been laughed to scorn, as it is, in these days with us "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects" was as systematically violated then as now. The gendarmerie of Paris no more permitted the circulation of petitions to Government for a redress of grievances, than do the police authorities of New York; and innocent persons were denounced as spies, or arrested on suspicion of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, at the instance of the Dictator, and with the sanction of his pliant tools in the Convention, precisely as such things have been done at a much later day and much nearer home. Is it necessary that we should point out any further the almost perfect correspondence between the acts of the French Republicans nearly three quarters of a century ago, and those of the American Republicans of to day? We might compare the lave passed by both, and show their similarity in all essential particulars, and we might cite Mr Trumbull's bill as the crowning infamy of a long series of outrages; but we forbear. It is sufficient for us to note the accuracy with which history sometimes repeats itself, and to warn every man who loves liberty and hates oppression to take heed, lest he lose the former and fall a victim to the latter, through the sanction which he may have given, or the toleration he may have extended, to the despotic measures of the Administration.
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