Call government, then, what we will, social compact, divine institution, natural growth of time and circumstances—conceive of it under any form—still there is ever the same essential idea. It is ever one absolute, earthly, sovereign power, acting, within a certain territory, as the sanction and guaranty of all civil or political rights, in other words, of all rights that can not exist without it. There may be many intermediate links in the chain, but it is only by virtue of this, in the last appeal, that one man has the exclusive right to the house in which he lives, or to the land which he occupies. Hence alone, too, are all the _civil_ rights of marriage and the domestic relations. The family is born of the state. On this account, says Socrates, may it be held that _the law has begotten us_, and we may be justly called its sons. There is the same idea in the maxim of Cicero, _In aris et focis est respublica_; and in this thought we find the peculiar malignity of that awful crime of treason. It is a _breach of trust_, and, in respect to government, of the most sacred trust. It is the foulest parricide. It is aiming a dagger at that civic life from which flows all the social and domestic vitality. The notion, in feudal times, had for its outward type the relation of lord and dependent—of service and obedience on the one hand, and protection on the other. The form has changed, but the essential idea remains, and ever must remain, while human government exists on earth. He who breaks this vital bond, he who would seek to have the protection to his person and his property, while he forfeits the tenure of citizenship, he is the _traitor_. And hence arises the essential difference between treason and mobbism. The man who is guilty of the former not only commits violence, but means by that violence to assail the very existence through which alone he himself may be said to exist as a citizen, or member of a living political organism. There is no more alarming feature of the times than the indifference with which men begin to look upon this foul, unnatural crime, and even to palliate it under the softened title of “political offenses,” or a mere difference in political opinions. To punish it is thought to savor only of barbarism and a barbarous age. If we judge, however, from the tremendous consequences which must result from its impunity, ordinary murder can not be named in the comparison. If he who takes a single life deserves the gallows, of how much sorer punishment shall he be thought worthy who aims at the life of a nation—a nation, too, like our own, the world’s last hope, the preservation of whose political integrity is the most effectual means of INTERVENTION we can employ in favor of true freedom in every other part of the globe.