When in August of this year a meeting in Cincinnati resolved to silence J. G. Birney’s abolitionist press by violence, the _Evening Post_ used similar words. No tyranny in any part of the world was more absolute or frightful than such mob tyranny. “So far as we are concerned, we are resolved that this despotism shall neither be submitted to nor encouraged.... We are resolved that the subject of slavery shall be, as it ever has been, as free a subject for discussion, and argument, and declamation, as the difference between whiggism and democracy, or the difference between Arminians and Calvinists.” This was at a time when the right of Abolitionists to continue their agitation was denied from some of the most influential New York pulpits, when the great majority of citizens had no tolerance for them, and when newspapers like Bennett’s _Herald_ and Hallock’s _Journal of Commerce_, both pro-slavery, gave them nothing but contempt and denunciation. When Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton, Ill., by a mob, there were influential New Yorkers who believed that he had received his deserts, but Bryant cried out in horror. Without free tongues and free pens, the nation would fall into despotism or anarchy. “We approve, then, we applaud--we would consecrate, if we could, to universal honor--the conduct of those who bled in this gallant defense of the freedom of the press. Whether they erred or not in their opinions, they did not err in the conviction of their right, as citizens of a democratic State, to express them; nor did they err in defending their rights with an obstinacy which yielded only to death.”