Newark Daily Advertiser, January 12, 1861

It is impossible to condemn too strongly the pestiferous inventions and exaggerations of reckless political gossips and paid letter-writers, whom the times have hatched into being. The moral influence they are wielding, perhaps without being fully conscious of it themselves, is dangerous to the last degree. Hundreds are circulating stories, which have scarcely a color of truth—chiefly for the amusement of the public, never reflecting for a moment, that the injurious fables they are scattering far and near, have a direct tendency to take the bread out of the mouths of thousands, and in the end to endanger the Union everywhere, and bring anarchy itself in their train. These political guidances do it, we know, for bread, and don't seem to see, that the moral causes, which their correspondence sets agoing, will bring death to others, and possibly the destruction of government, law and peace.

Who can measure the mischief of seriously discussing the rumored intended invasion of the Capitol by the crack-brained Wise, and thus beginning a civil war in trying to prevent the regular inauguration of President Lincoln? Is it worth anybody's while to talk in print about such an improbable occurrence, and thereby familiarizing the minds of men with insurrection, battle and bloodshed? It would be an ineffectual and absurd project, because the President may qualify himself for the office by taking the oath of allegiance before any magistrate authorized to administer one at any other place as well as Washington. Why, are we not well aware, that it was the writers and not the actors of the day, who ushered in the horrid tragedies of the great French Revolution of '93? Had the encyclopedists never inflamed the popular masses by their burning eloquence, that revolution would not have taken place when it did, perhaps not at all, for, had it been delayed, modifications and ameliorations may, and probably would have been agreed to, and so a good government gradually matured after the example of the English constitution, which has grown to what it is by frequent accretions favorable to popular liberty adapted to the improved ideas of different. ages.

It may be good sensation news to startle the public with the astounding relation that Collector Schell and Democratic office holders generally are engendering a plot, whereby they will all hold over, continue to receive the public monies after the third of March, and pay them to the government or city of New York. We have no doubt that the people are too intelligent to say anything but poh! to so absurd a story. Should they ever take the trouble to read it, they will throw the print that contains it down, and forget at once the insult on the public. But what if such things shall abuse the public eye from day to day? What if all sorts of plans for throwing the country into confusion on the advent of the new administration should be perpetually obtruded on popular notice, will not the effect be full of mischief? Will not men's minds by custom be gradually wrought to belligerent ideas and resolves, and differing opinions lose something of their usual pacific character, and contract an element of force and violence? Moral causes are slow, but are apt to be sure, and this, because the mind has been first reconciled to their operation.

The North has nothing to do with revolutionary ideas or projects among themselves. Leave all these to the South. The former have no cause of mutual distrust or discontent. The Union is ours. Let us keep it, whoever else may be foolish enough to give it up. To every just and patriotic person, it seems next to treason even to imagine, that any body in the free states, whether officers or private individuals, whether Democrats or republicans, can possibly harbor any imagination, much less any scheme, of disorganization, disobedience of law or constitutional authority in any event. We say not, what the free states will do, or be required to do, in relation to the rebellion at the South; but one thing they surely ought to do, and that is, they should turn a deaf ear of disbelief to every rumor of intended disobedience to established authority in any quarter whatever, and discountenance entirely all reports that any men exist at the North who are capable of doing an act this year which they, as well as their fellow-citizens, would last year have branded as the blackest of crimes against the government and laws.