Abuse of power

“ I look around me with doubt, agitation, and dismay; because, whilst I venerate those to whom the sway of a part of a state may be said to be intrusted, I cannot but yield to the conviction that the abuse of power must be felt to be an overstep of authority in the best intentioned of the Magistracy. ”

“ We are told, that such wild and irrational abuse of power is not to be apprehended, and is not to be tahen into view when discussing its existence. All power malabe abused; and if the fear of its abuse it to constitute amargument against its existence, it might be urged against the existence of that which is universally acknowledged, and which is indispensable to the general safety. ”

“ At least this much was gained, that the one who abused power must first secure it from those whom he proposed to abuse, and must later exercise it unrestrained to the detriment of those from whom the power was derived and in whom it still resided. ”

“ And it is clear that the way in which the oligarchies used their power varied also. The cases in which the power was abused are naturally the ones of which we hear; for an abuse of power gave rise to discontent and was the ultimate cause of revolution. ”

“ Possibly, here and there an extremist might be found to object, that, thus openly to set up, as he did, his own prejudices and those of his family, in the place of law, justice and humanity, as his rule of official conduct, to the manifest injury of twenty-seven thousands of innocent people, was a most shameless abuse of power and perversion of authority. ”

“ We no longer dread abuse of the power of state or church; we do dread abuse of the powers of compact bodies of men, highly organized and consenting to be despotically ruled, for the advancement of their selfish interests. ”

“ And for unreasonable, and inhuman, and criminal acts, the appropriate drapery is, insane acts; and an usurpation of human rights and an abuse of power over the defenceless, is appropriately clothed by the term, Despotism. And one who defends his creed or party by improper and abusive means, is a Bigot. One who is impatient and unwilling to endure, and will not hear the utterance of opinions in conflict with his own, without persecution of his opponent, is Intolerant towards him; and this is an appropriate word to use in describing such manifestations. ”

“ It takes the position that abuse of power, in relation to private rights or to commerce, is excess of power and hence demands to be shown the substantial effect of legislation, not its mere formal justification. ”

“ In all these Governments, indeed alike, that power may by possibility be abused, but whether the abuse is such as to justify and call for the interference of the people collectively, or, more properly speaking, of any portion of it, must always be an extreme case and a question of the greatest and most perilous responsibility, not in Law only, but in Conscience and in Duty, to all those who either act upon it [62] themselves, or persuade others to do so. ”

“ We clothe a public officer with power, we arm him with influential authority over public opinion; not that he may apply these authentic sanctions to the backing of his own malice, and giving weight to his private caprices: and, wherever such abuse takes place, then it should be so contrived that some reaction in behalf of the injured person might receive a sanction equally public. ”

“ It will be said, that it is opening a door to rebellion, to assert that magistrates, abusing their power, may be set a side by the the people, who are of course their own judges when that power is abused. May not the people, it is said, abuse their power, as well as their governors? I answer, it is very possible they may abuse their power: it is possible they may imagine themselves oppressed when they are not: it is possible that their animosity may be artfully and unreasonably inflamed, by ambitious and enterprising men, whose views are often best answered by popular tumults and insurrections ”

“ All that is said amounts to this, that when ever men in power to evert and subvert all the ends of government, and intrude themselves upon it, and abuse it, to the hurt of the commonwealth, and the destruction of that for which government was appointed; they are then tyrants, and cease to be magistrates. ”

“ If, however, the times were disturbed, if the parties were divided by acute discord and men’s minds inflamed by the memories of a terrible civil war, the sense of justice was, nevertheless, not yet so much blunted by party passions as to allow the dominant party to abuse their own power beyond a certain point. ”

“ Where any one person or body of men, who do not represent the Whole, seize into their hands the power in the last resort, there is properly no longer a government, but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one. ”

“ If, without the authority of congress, such proceedings may be instituted by him upon the repetition as in this case, of old charges, or upon the unsupported statements of interested parties, a cloud may at any moment be cast upon the titles of a whole people, and there would be in his hands a tremendous weapon of vexation and oppression. I can never assent to the position that there exists in any officer of the government a power so liable to abuse, and so dangerous to h e peace of many communities. ”

“ Direct or tyrannical power, by means of the prerogative, or the simple will, of the sovereign, having become impossible, in consequence of the safeguards established by the Great Rebellion and the Revolution, and the disposition to tyranny and abuse remaining the same, from the corrupt tendency of the human heart, the system of gaining a majority, both in Parliament and in the constituencies, by means of government influence and official corruption, became the acknowledged, and probably unavoidable, basis of government. ”

“ Their power should be carefully confined to the preservation of the public peace, and any attempt to go beyond this limit should be promptly punished. The correction of the evil is to be found in the exact determination of their authority. ”

“ First, because the greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse. ”

“ I cannot be loyal to a system of meanness, terror, and corruption, although it usurp the title and assume the form of a 'government.' So long as such a 'government' presumes to injure and insult me, and those in whose prosperity I am involved, I must offer to it all the resistance in my power. ”

“ Above all that generation deeply feared and bitterly abhorred the existence of arbitrary, unchecked power in the hands of any government official, particularly when it came to punishing alleged offenses against the state. ”

“ They would govern men against their will, but in that government they would be discharged from the exercise of vigilance, providence, and fortitude: and, therefore, that they may sleep on their watch, they consent to take some one division of the society into partnership of the tyranny over the rest. But let government, in what form it may be, comprehend the whole in its justice, and restrain the suspicious by its vigilance; let it keep watch and ward; let it discover by its sagacity, and punish by its firmness, all delinquency against its power, whenever delinquency exists in the overt acts ”

“ If it were possible that a people brought up under an intolerant and arbitrary system could subvert that system without acts of cruelty and folly, half the objections to despotic power would be removed. ”

“ How the heart-burnings in a shepherd's family drove a minister of state to the foot of Pharaoh's throne. And how, for purposes still more important, a shepherd-boy was enabled to govern a mighty kingdom.
From the same pure Fountain of Wisdom we learn that vice destroys freedom; that arbitrary power is founded on public immorality, and that misconduct in those who rule a republic, necessary consequence of general licentiousness, so disgusts and degrades the nation, that, dead to generous sentiment, they become willing slaves. ”

“ What does it avail to expose the absurd contrivance, or pernicious tendency of measures, if the man, who advises or executes, shall be suffered not only to escape with impunity, but even to preserve his power, and insult us with the favour of his Sovereign. ”

“ We may be, in my opinion, my lords, censured as traitors to our trust, and enemies to our country, if we permit any vice to prevail, when it is in our power to suppress it. We may be cursed, with justice, by posterity, as the abettors of that debauchery by which poverty and disease shall be entailed upon them, contemned in the present as the flatterers of those appetites which we ought to regulate, and insulted by that populace whom we dare not oppose. ”

“ When these external alarms are past, and the people are enjoying their good fortune and the fruits of their victories, and, as usually happens, growing corrupted by flattery and sloth, show a tendency to violence and arrogance—it is in these circumstances more than ever that the constitution is seen to possess within itself the power of correcting abuses. ”

“ Without the aggrandizement of self and the abasement of others, without hypocrisies and deceptions, without prisons, fortresses, executions, and murders, no power can come into existence or be maintained.
"If the power of government is suppressed the more wicked will oppress the less wicked," say the champions of state authority. ”

“ The law, therefore, which forbids the speaking evil of the ruler of the people, is certainly to be understood with proper exceptions, so as not to exclude any just censure of rulers, when their abuse of office, and the cause of truth and justice, may render such censure expedient and seasonable. ”

“ I have heard in highest places the shameless doctrine avowed by men grown old in public office, that the true way in which power should be gained in the Republic is to bribe the people with the offices created for their service, and the true end for which it should be used when gained is the promotion of selfish ambition and the gratification of personal revenge. ”

“ But to declare by authority of parliament that the offenders are so numerous, and the abuse of so spreading and dangerous nature, that the severe penalties already enacted are inadequate to the preventing it, will not this suggest to every unprejudiced man the dread, that enemies so numerous could not have arisen without previous oppression, and that abuse so calculated to spread must have some foundation in truth? ”

“ The favourite Subject of its Clamours will be the Misconduct of Those who govern. And in a Country where Liberty is justly ranked among the greatest national Blessings, the most plausible Pretence of Faction will be, "to load the executive Power with the Charge of Despotism." ”

“ To attack the state immediately is to be guilty either of rebellion or high treason. Rebellion is to attempt to raise, or actually to raise, a power in hostility to the power of the state, and to resist therewith that power of the state. ”

“ He was eloquently warm in defending such humble rights, and declaimed on the subject with all the impassioned fervor of an injured man, and yet so corrupting is power, so subtle are the arguments by which one establishes differences and distinctions, that now he himself saw nothing strange nor severe in exercising this harsh rule towards another. ”

“ For, abuses in administration may last much longer than politicians seem to be aware of; especially where some bold steps are made to corrupt the very fountain of power and legislature: in which case, as it may happen in some states, the whole body of the people are drawn in, by their own supposed consent, to be their own enslavers ”

“ That under a former administration, the greatest abuses of all kinds were committed, and the most dangerous attempts against the constitution for some time intended. The whole kingdom finds the present persons in power, directly and openly pursuing the true service of their QUEEN and country; and to be such whom their most bitter enemies cannot tax with bribery, covetousness, ambition, pride, insolence, or any pernicious principles in religion or government. ”

“ Because power may be abused, shall we be reduced to anarchy? What hinders our state legislatures from abusing their powers?... May we not rationally suppose that the persons we shall choose to administer the government will be, in general, good men? ”

“ Give them clearly to understand that your power rests, not as they have hitherto imagined, on their rational convictions, or on their habitual veneration, or on your own great property, but on a system fertile of political evils, fertile also of low iniquities of which ordinary justice take cognisance. ”

“ Next, as to cases of ordinary public oppression, where the vitals of the constitution are not attacked, the law hath also assigned a remedy. For, as a king cannot misuse his power, without the advice of evil counsellors, and the assistance of wicked ministers, these men may be examined and punished. ”

“ Monarchies are subject to all those abuses, which depend on an irresponsible administration of power, and an absence of publicity; abuses that oppress the majority for the benefit of a few, and which induce subserviency of character, frauds, flatteries and other similar vices. ”

“ If an innocent, unoffending, and highly beneficial institution could be thus easily destroyed by the power of one man, where would be the difficulty of crushing it, if it had given any real cause for just animadversion? ”

“ But something in all of us, and much in some of us, is recalcitrant through rebellion, indolence, incompetence, or ignorance. And it is only on these elements that the public power operates as power, through compulsion {201} or authoritative suggestion. ”