Lancaster Daily Evening Express, January 17, 1861

We notice that Mr. Corwin's report of the Congressional Committee of Thirty-Three deprecates the licentiousness of the press, and recommends the States to pass such laws as will prevent the evil assuming a formidable aspect, maintaining, however, the freedom of the press. The partisan press of the country no doubt deserves this censure. The present sectional excitement is unquestionably owing in a great degree to the unscrupulous misrepresentation of the principles and purposes of political parties by the opposing party organs; but Mr. Corwin overlooked another powerful element in this sectional discord which deserves more censure than the press. We refer to the practice of partisans, in Congress and on the stump, persistently misrepresenting their political opponents and saying everything calculated to inflame the already excited public mind. We send representatives to Congress to attend to the practical business of national legislation, and to inaugurate such measures as are calculated to promote the interests of our common country. Instead of attending to this business, for which they are elected, and for which they are paid, they fritter away the best hours of each session of Congress, in misrepresenting each other, and in arraying one section of the country against the other. Yet, for this Congressional licentiousness the Committee of Thirty-Three have no word of censure.

Again: Who are more censurable for the present unhappy state of affairs in the South than the political demagogues who went over the country in the late canvass, persistently misrepresenting the purposes of their political opponents? The Southern people were told by these demagogues, and their reckless assertions were re-echoed by their party organs, that if Mr. Lincoln was elected President, the object of himself and party was to incite the slaves to servile insurrection or, in some other undefined and undefinable way, secure their emancipation! Nay, more; some of these unscrupulous partisans so far departed from truth and decency, as to say that a majority of the people of the North were trying to elect a negro to the office of Vice President—a gross insult to Mr. Hamlin who had served with distinction in the Senate of the United States, on the same floor, and, for a long time, in the same party with the utterers of the slander! These men thus sowed the wind of which they now fear to reap the whirl-wind. The more intelligent slaves of the South could not fail to hear these strange declarations, and hearing, how natural for them in their ignorance to believe them. The consequence is now seen in the reign of terror inaugurated in the South, through fear of a servile insurrection.

Nor is this party licentiousness confined to either the Southern press or partisan speakers. We have it here in the North. Men lack a broad comprehensive national feeling and sympathy. Men who look upon intemperance and slavery as great sins, can exercise charity for the drunkard and the liquor seller, associate with them as brothers, vote with them and maintain a friendly intercourse, and yet close their heart to the first impulse of charity for the slaveholder. They seem to make no allowance for the influence of dissimilar education, of contrariety of interests, and of social system[s] as widely diverse as the poles. This feeling manifests itself through the press and in our halls of legislation. Even now, when patriotic men are seeking to allay the sectional excitement which threatens to engulf our beloved country in the fathomless slough of disunion, and to plunge the States into all the horrors of civil war, a State Senator rises in his place and makes a speech brimfull of sectional animosity. The sentiments he utters are heralded on the wings of the trained lightning to the extreme South, to be used there as fuel to feed the now raging fires of treason and revolution, and to poison the minds of the Union men in the Border States against us. The fanatical utterances of one of the representatives of Allegheny, are quoted with exultation as an exhibition of the unfriendly feelings of our State against the South, and war-like hostility to her institutions, when, in reality, the real sentiment of the State, if it could be fairly expressed to-day, is in favor of some practical and honorable exhibition by our representatives of a friendly feeling and tangible assurance that Pennsylvania accords to sister States all the constitutional guarantees she claims for herself, and while submitting loyally to the supreme authority, she will be satisfied with nothing less from them.

This partisan licentiousness which Mr. Corwin has discovered in the press, also manifests itself in another, and if possible, more mischievous shape. Meetings to advance the interests of party and scheming ambition are got up under the guise of Union demonstrations. As a striking illustration of this, we notice a meeting held in New-York on Tuesday evening, called as a demonstration of the "working men" of that city, but really managed by such political demagogues and party roughs as Captain Rynders, whose only claim to the honorable appellation of a working man is the zeal he ever manifests in doing the dirty work of party, which the more conscientious would hesitate to do. In a meeting controlled by such a master spirit we are not surprised to learn that a proposition for three cheers for the venerable patriot and soldier, General Scott, was received with hisses; or that the policy of the federal executive in enforcing the laws of the nation and defending the national property and honor should be denounced, in formal resolutions and vituperative speeches, as a sequence to the oppressive policy of Great Britain in attempting to "coerce" the Thirteen United Colonies, or, to adopt the classic Rynderism of one of the resolutions, as "Britishism!"

Verily, the licenciousness of modern partisan politics is an evil to be deeply deplored by every lover of his country; and our readers will doubtless agree with us that the Committee of Thirty-Three only skimmed the surface of the festering ulcer, when they referred to the licenciousness of the press!