We have them for our own protection; if they should include provisions for the protection of our neighbors it would be no additional encroachment upon the liberty of the press." The Governors of Virginia and Georgia remonstrated with Harrison Gray Otis, who was Mayor of Boston in the memorable year of 1831, "against an incendiary newspaper published in Boston, and, as they alleged, thrown broadcast among their plantations, inciting to insurrection and its horrid results." As a lawyer Mayor Otis, however, "perceived the intrinsic, if not insuperable obstacles to legislative enactments made to prevent crimes from being consummated beyond the local jurisdiction." But the South was not seeking a legal opinion as to what it could or could not do.

It demanded, legal or illegal, that Garrison and the _Liberator_ be suppressed.

To the Boston mayor the excitement over the editor and his paper seemed like much ado about nothing.

The cause appeared to his supercilious mind altogether inadequate to the effect.

And so he set to work to reduce the panic by exposing the vulgarity and insignificance of the object, which produced it.