together at variance with their faith. They cannot pay the fines which you impose for their refusal, for you demand them as an equivalent for what they cannot concede to you. Here then are they placed, without (according to their belief) the power of moving. If you insist upon the payment, you must despoil them of their goods. It is to be sure alleged, that the state cannot, with a due regard to its own safety, dispense with the military allegiance of its citizens. Admit this to be the case. Do you, in abstaining from the petty, alienating vexations of a militia law in time of peace, yield or forego the claim to this allegiance? You pass an edict oppressive to a class of citizens, whose motive for non-compliance is sacred in the eye of the constitution,—an edict, which your experience of the past assures you, they will not comply with, and you create, in order to enforce it, a race of harpies, who are trained under it in all the arts of oppression and plunder. And to what good end? Does one solitary dollar of these militia exactions pass into your treasury? Is it not, on the contrary, a well known fact, that after seizing upon twice or thrice the just amount of the claim, the proceeds of the sale of these goods melt away before they reach the public treasury? The ostensible object of the law is to train the yeomenry in the art of war. My word for it, its actual operation is more to enervate than to strengthen, and while it forms a dark blot on the escutcheon of our state, there is not,[289] in its consequences, a single salutary effect to compensate for the hardships it inflicts upon the followers of the great statesman, who laid the foundations of our public and private prosperity, our liberal institutions; of all, in short, which has rendered Pennsylvania the boast and the envy of nations.

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FOR THE RURAL