Is it now, as it was formerly, the necessary tendency of all alarming and apparently fatal convulsions of society and governments, to realize often permanent good out of temporary evil? The political revolutions which distinguished the close of the 18th century were accompanied with various secondary movements more benign and pacific in their character, and more lasting in their results, though not contemplated by the then apostles of anarchy. The changes to which I refer were perhaps among their legitimate results, and when they have been studied through a period longer than the perturbations which produced them, they will doubtless be ranked among the compensatory adjustments, in which Providence strikes a balance between present and overwhelming evils and future and permanent good; for in the political as well as in the natural world the desolating torrent, which sweeps away its bulwarks, often loses its power in the depths of its own excavations, whilst it forms a new barrier out of the very elements it displaced. Thus, in every country which has passed like ours through a great and sudden revolution, or been the scene of public excitement and party spirit, there will be a principle of adjustment and order springing out of the most dangerous and disorganizing commotions. That our land has been lately the witness of most daring outrages upon public peace and private rights—that the torch of the incendiary, and the more fearful and disgraceful out-breakings of lawless violence and ferocious passion, have trampled law and order before our eyes in the dust, and that life and property have been swept away by the sirocco breath of popular tumult, are melancholy facts attested in many parts of our country—and to one unacquainted with the genius of our institutions and the habits of our people, these were indeed most startling evidences of the inefficiency of the one and the unfitness of the other for self-government. But, my fellow-citizens, at the bottom of the American character and closely interwoven with its general sentiment, is a recuperative and renovating principle of right and order, which, sooner or later compensates for the devastation and ruin of one day, by years of order and submission to the laws, and binds as victims upon their own _Moloch_ altars the mad passions and daring spirits which perpetrated it. Let not, therefore, our confidence and hopes be diminished or torn from the true, essential and _conservative_ principles of our institutions, but rather let these evils stimulate us to greater zeal and more devoted labor, in spreading far and wide, by means of knowledge and religion, the true and only remedies—and though the storm may howl and the clouds gather over portions of the country, oh! let us still cling with unfaltering confidence to our _union_, to our _religion_, to our _liberties_. In this age kindred minds will unite their sympathies either for good or