while from all sides voices cried out, “Will ye stop the draft, Gov’nur?” “Bully boy!” “Ye’re the man for us!” “Hooray for Gov’nur Saymoor!” Thus, through the midst of this admiring and applauding crowd, this high officer of the law, sworn to maintain public peace, moved to his hotel, where he was met by a despatch from Washington, informing him that five regiments were under arms and on their way to put an end to this bloody assistance to the Southern war.

His allies in newspaper offices attempted to throw the blame upon the loyal press and portion of the community.  This was but a repetition of the cry, raised by traitors in arms, that the government, struggling for life in their deadly hold, was responsible for the war:  “If thou wouldst but consent to be murdered peaceably, there could be no strife.”

These editors outraged common sense, truth, and decency, by speaking of the riots as an “uprising of the people to defend their liberties,”—­“an opposition on the part of the workingmen to an unjust and oppressive law, enacted in favor of the men of wealth and standing.”  As though the people of the great metropolis were incendiaries, robbers, and assassins; as though the poor were to demonstrate their indignation against the rich by hunting and stoning defenceless women and children; torturing and murdering men whose only offence was the color God gave them, or men wearing the self-same uniform as that which they declared was to be thrust upon them at the behest of the rich and the great.

It was absurd and futile to characterize this new Reign of Terror as anything but an effort on the part of Northern rebels to help Southern ones, at the most critical moment of the war,—­with the State militia and available troops absent in a neighboring Commonwealth,—­and the loyal people unprepared.  These editors and their coadjutors, men of brains and ability, were of that most poisonous growth,—­traitors to the Government and the flag of their country,—­renegade Americans.  Let it, however, be written plainly and graven deeply, that the tribes of savages—­the hordes of ruffians—­found ready to do their loathsome bidding, were not of native growth, nor American born.

While it is true that there were some glib-tongued fellows who spoke the language without foreign accent, all of them of the lowest order of Democratic ward-politicians, of creatures skulking from the outstretched arm of avenging law; while the most degraded of the German population were represented; while it is also true that there were Irish, and Catholic Irish too,—­industrious, sober, intelligent people,—­who indignantly refused participation in these outrages, and mourned over the barbarities which were disgracing their national name; it is pre-eminently true,—­proven by thousands of witnesses, and testified to by numberless tongues,—­that the masses, the rank and file, the almost entire body of rioters, were the worst classes of Irish emigrants, infuriated by artful appeals, and maddened by the atrocious whiskey of thousands of grog-shops.