PAPERS OF MIRABEAU BuoNAPARTE LAM.An
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burthens? · If the Country is thus poor, now is the precise crisis to yield to the more. hon?rable alternative of surrendering the attributes and bonds of nat10nahty and of resolving ourselves into our natural •elements as individuals-choose a patriarch & assume the customs and polity of the primeval ages. The naked truth is this: Hansford, actually ·or reputedly, has be- ·come unacceptable to a portion of his district ! It is said he is so very unpopular that in some two of his counties it is unsafe for him to hold his courts ! How caused-whether justly or because some of bis official judgements have conflicted with the interests of some of the people . . . as, for example, some large-grant or border-league- grant question is unknown. And what, if those in a particular locality., having a community of interest, have assembled on some mens sace-r, with a view to put down every large grant by preventing any judicial investigation, to which, were it subjected to a full course of trial & .appeal, it might be condemned as illegal or fraudulent; & have con- stituted their tribunes to negative the laws and cry veto to the acts of the magistrate? What If this ferment have taken its tricolore and hoisted its flag? Are these to be endured? Are these to be favored? Are these to be obeyed? Is the watch-cry to be sounded within the balls of the nation, and the ensign of anarchy to be lifted in triumph within the sanctuaries of the liberties of the whole people? Then again is this the day of national dissolution. If this be a mis- taken supposition: if in fact there have been something in the con- ·duct of the officer· that has justly rendered him odious, in the popul~r damor against him to be the basis on which Congress is to act m this mode of expulsion? Suppose the Constitution did not forbid th~s eourse & did not specify another mode of trial & removal . . . is he to be tried, condemned degraded & disfranchised by the process of a legislative act? Is the Congress of Texas prepared to exhibit. t_o the world such a spectacle? It is an enormity that cannot be antici- pated. The meanest offender is not touched in a solitary right with- out monition, prelimenary examination, confronting him with his a?- cusers, hearing his witnesses, and the defence of his counsel: aye, if he be so destitute as to be unable to have learned defenders, counsel must be assigned him : and the verdict of a. jury must condemn- But the passage of the bill sent from the Senate erects the pillar of Cal_igula, inscribes on its high top the sentence of proscription, and at its foot puts the block. & the executioner. Finally, take all this to be unsubstantial & illusory-concede that Congress is omnipotent, standing unadmonished by the constitution to recede on the chief principle of the bill-the extinction of the seventh circuit, there is another feature of the measure that possibly may de~· mand some common and decent ·observance of justice. Why was it that its projector, in casting the counties into six instead of seven circuits, changed, utterly changed the original localities of the third and fourth districts? Was there any necessity or even any call for this? Were the incumbents of those circuits consulted? Why destroy, wholly de- stroy the fourth or western, and carve out a fourth upon almost the whole stretch of the Indian frontier, and give to the judges of the ~ird & second districts the whole of the original fourth? The effect 1s .to banish the judge . of the fourth from his entire circuit and left him
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