Richmond Enquirer

The Mayor of Boston has arrested the master of a coasting vessel on a demand for three thousand dollars penalty, for introducing passengers contrary to the laws of the State for preventing the introduction of paupers.

The existence and execution of such laws at Boston are facts of no little interest, as bearing on the principle involved in the great debate on the final question of the admission of the State of Missouri into the Union. The case in Massachusetts is so much the stronger, as it relates to free white persons, and not to free persons of color; and so much stronger still, as the prohibition is effected by a legislative act, and not (as in the case of Missouri) by the organic law. It is thus that time tests the truth of all propositions, as it does of the professions of men. Massachusetts, the resolute opponent of the admission of Missouri into the Union, has not only gone a step beyond that State in the theory to which exception was taken, but has reduced that theory to practice, which we do not know that Missouri has ever done. We make this memorandum only to shew, to our Eastern fellow-citizens, if that be yet necessary, how much that baleful question was misunderstood by them.