message, the Legislature is left to conjecture as to the object
which the discriminations made by these rules are intended to
accomplish. From subsequent passages in this estate paper,
we are led to infer that these discriminating rules may be
regulations for the employment of "brute force to control
the ballot-box," and "deter the quiet and peaceably disposed
citizens from the exercise of the right of suffrage; " or they
may consist in a series of provisions adapted "to allow a citi-
zen to be proscribed on account of his religious faith," in
both of which suppositions the Governor is, undoubtedly, not
without the strongest reason for asserting that the dis-
criminations would be clearly against the Constitution of
each and of all of the States of this Union.

Whatever may be the import of the facts of which the
Executive has obtained a partial revelation, they have made
a very profound impression upon the fears of the Chief
Magistrate, enough has been divulged to him to authorize
him to say that it furnished evidence of "a formidable effort
to segregate and divide " the whole people into clans or
classes " by a proposed exclusion from the rights of citizen-
ship on account of place of birth or religious opinions," and
to compel him to warn the State against "a war of races and
sects," which he regards as a calamity to be averted by a
timely interference of the Legislature.

The intensity of the Governor's alarm at the existence of
these secret societies, may be measured by the earnest-
ness with which he declares that they "have already been
productive of more baneful consequences than any thing which
has occurred since the organization of our government." He
makes this assertion upon full deliberation and conviction of
the portentous mischiefs brought to view in the next topic of
his message, touching a most disastrous popular agitation
now rife in all its virulence over the land, which he justly de-
scribes as having once "brought us to the very verge of dis-
union," and which he believes, even now, induces "great
reason to fear that our blessed Union will prove to be but a
rope of sand, and the Constitution, which is the sacred bond
of that Union, instead of being a protecting shield, and a
blessing to the people of the South (be converted into) an in-