Illegitimacy

“ Some of these powers, dominions, governments, and rulers, have had in their possession the laws of God, and the admonitions of Jesus Christ; and what have they done to his servants in different ages of the world, when he has sent them unto them? This question I need not stop to answer, for you are already made too familiar with it. This, then, is the position of the world. Authority, dominion, rule, government has been obtained by fraud, and consequently is not legitimate. ”

“ No wonder that the Editor of The Times bows his head before the idol of Divine Right, or of Legitimacy, (as he calls it) which has had more lives sacrificed to its ridiculous and unintelligible pretensions, in the last twenty-five years, than were ever sacrificed to any other idol in all preceding ages. Never was there any thing so well contrived as this fiction of Legitimacy, to suit the fastidious delicacy of modern sycophants. It hits their grovelling servility and petulant egotism exactly between wind and water. ”

“ Is it better to be a subject and a man, or a citizen and a flunkey—to own the sway of a "gory tyrant" and retain one's self-respect, or dwell, a "sovereign elector," in the land of liberty and disgrace it? ”

“ Legitimacy is not there militant, but triumphant, as the Editor of The Times would wish. It is long since the people had any thing to do with the laws but to obey them, or any laws to obey but the will of their taskmasters. This is the necessary end of legitimacy. The Princes and Potentates cut one another’s throats as they please, but the people have no hand in it. ”

“ Against legitimacy is arrayed usurpation: against modest, single-minded, righteous, and brave resistance to encroachment, is arrayed boastful, double-tongued, selfish, and treacherous ambition to possess. ”

“ The danger to his own reputation, and, in the case of an elective Magistrate, to his political existence, from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as a barrier to the one and to the other. ”

“ Sir, when we reason about the great interests of a free people, it is high time that we dismiss our prejudices, and banish declamation. In order to induce us to consider the powers given by this Constitution as dangerous, in order to render plausible an attempt to take away the life and spirit of the most important power in government, the gentleman complains that we shall not have a true and safe representation. ”

“ On the other hand, any people, that judge of, and determine authoritatively for the government, what are their own liberties against the government, of course retain all the liberties they wish to enjoy. ”

“ And if they answer, no; as certainly they will, if they speak truth; we may further ask them, Why should they judge for themselves any more than others; or claim to themselves a liberty and an exemption which they will not allow to others? The truth is, they who complain thus, only want to increase the power of the crown, because by it their own would be increased, and other advantages acquired. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, for my part, I think that there is no being so dangerous as the solemn hypocrite, who, because he drills his cold nature into serving mechanically some conventional abstraction,— whether he calls it 'the Constitution' or 'the Public,'—holds himself dispensed from whatever, in the warm blood of private life, wins attachment to goodness, and confidence to truth. ”

“ All these privileges must be particular to the nobility, and incommunicable to the people, unless we intend to act contrary to the principle of government, and to diminish the power of the nobles together with that of the people. ”

“ Defenseless, still are we subject to restrictions, bonds as illogical in theory as unjust in practice. Helpless, we may formulate as we will; but demonstrate we may not. The query persists in thrusting itself upon my mind, why should I be amenable to a law that does not accord me recognition? Why, indeed, should I owe loyalty and allegiance to a Government that stamps my brow with the badge of servility and inferiority? ”

“ The nobility, it is true, have some privileges annexed to their birth; the judges, and other magistrates, have some annexed to their office; and professional men have some annexed to their professions:—but these privileges are neither injurious to the liberty or property of other men. ”

“ There cannot be a stronger proof of that genuine freedom, which is the boast of this age and country, than the power of discussing and examining, with decency and respect, the limits of the king's prerogative. ”

“ 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." ”

“ I shall never believe that this human good, so universally preferred to all others — and without which all others are nothing — is a simple illusion. My heart tells me that liberty is possible, that its regime is easier and more stable than any arbitrary government, than any oligarchy. ”

“ We ought to be suspicious of our liberties. We have felt the effects of oppressive measures, and know the happy consequences of being jealous of our rights. I would be glad some gentleman would endeavor to obviate these objections, in order to satisfy the religious part of the society. ”

“ But under the influence of their old prejudices in favor of monarchy, and their minds lowered down by habit, to succumb to the doctrine of passive obedience, some of them were restless and uneasy in the society of men who had recently suffered so much to procure liberty and independence to themselves and posterity. ”

“ But my thoughts, I shall never yield to any human tribunal or oligarchy, as a just and proper matter for arbitration or discipline. It is my opinion that the time has gone by for thoughts to be chained to any creeds or oligarchys; but on the contrary, these chains and restraints which have so long bound the human reason to human dictation, must be broken, for the reign of individual, spiritual freedom is about dawning upon our progressive world. ”

“ For the Friend of Liberty, having no selfish Views, will be rational, honest, equitable, in the Prosecution of his Wishes. He who is actuated by the Spirit of Licentiousness and Faction, will be irrational, dishonest, iniquitous. ”

“ How far a system of this kind, which virtually places in the hands of the masters, many of whom are ignorant, and some of whom maybe capricious and tyrannical, an almost absolute control over the personal liberty of so many of their fellow men, is either warranted by law, or can be wholesome in itself, are questions which seem open to considerable doubt. ”

“ Thus, hatched by Licentiousness, Faction would attain to its enormous Growth: The unprincipled among the Great would form the Head, the unprincipled among the Populace would form the Body, of this rapacious Monster. ”

“ But when the visible interest of his crown and kingdom lies on one side; and when the other is but a faction, raised and strengthened by incidents and intrigues, and by deceiving the people with false representations of things; he ought in prudence to take the first opportunity of opening his subjects eyes, and declaring himself in favour of those, who are for preserving the civil and religious rights of the nation, wherewith his own are so interwoven. ”

“ You cannot catch them; they vanish under your grasp as principles, not men. Their voice is never heard saying, "I will!" but always, "The law requires." And these autocrats—this oligarchy—are only men like ourselves, with like passions, limitations and sinful inheritance. ”

“ They cannot declare justice and judgment, and they shall not be found where dark parables are spoken.' Yet, Sir, these are the men who, in our disastrous times, have menaced and governed the popular branch of our legislature, till they have drawn away all but their own partizans, and denied their King the rights of conscience, while they claim for themselves unbounded licence. ”

“ I cannot perceive that a negative, able to prevent such aggressions, which may alter the theory of our government, is less necessary for the preservation of liberty, if the integrity of the State rights is necessary for that purpose, than the tribunitial, regal, executive, senatorial, representative, and judicial negatives. ”

“ Hence it is, that we every where find tyranny and imposture, ignorance and slavery, joined together; and oppressors and deceivers mutually aiding and paying constant court to each other. Where-ever truth is dangerous, liberty is precarious. ”

“ But about the men who did much good for the state and no evil, to whom your thanks were due rather than punishment, (about these) you should accept no accusations, even if every one says they incline to the oligarchy. 12. To me, gentlemen of the jury, neither in private or public affairs did any disadvantage come on account of which. I was anxious to exchange existing evils for a different form of government. ”

“ The framers of the constitution too well understood the nature of human frailty, the influence of prepossession or vanity to believe that, by such a proceeding, either wisdom or impartiality, or the safety of private right would be promoted. ”

“ But having formed, from the best lights within my reach and the fullest examination in my power, some opinions different from those of my learned brethren, and having come to an opposite result, I do not feel at liberty to withhold them. For however highly I may respect the judgments of others, I cannot implicitly yield to them; and however deeply I may distrust my own, I am bound to be governed by its dictates. ”

“ If the principle were predicated of one individual alone, the assertion of his sovereignty, or, in other words, of his absolute right to do as he pleases, or to pursue his own happiness in his own way, would be, confessedly, to invest him with the attributes of despotism over others. ”

“ But the oppression that strikes at a humble individual, though it robs him of character, or fortune, or life, is remediless; and, if it becomes the subject of judicial enquiry, judges may lament, but cannot resist, the mandates of the legislature. Far different is the case in our country; and the privilege of bringing every law to the test of the constitution belongs to the humblest citizen, who owes no obedience to any legislative act which transcends the constitutional limits. ”

“ Thus by opposing one passion to another, and opinion to opinion, a wise legislator puts an end to the admiration of the populace, occasioned by a false principle, the original absurdity of which is veiled by some well-deduced consequences. ”

“ But when he quits this representation, this public will, and acts by his own private will, he degrades himself, and is but a single private person without power, and without will, that has any right to obedience; the members owing no obedience but to the public will of the society. ”

“ The latitude in which this society has understood its rights and immunities has given occasion to fear an unlimited extension and exercise of them, dangerous to all existing authority, civil and ecclesiastical, as the constitution of the order, and its erection into an independent monarchy in the bosom of other governments, have assumed a more fixed character. ”

“ No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty than that on which this objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. ”

“ It would be foolish to contend that our rulers are actuated by any personal malevolence or even, at first, by unlawful personal ambition; they are, as I have said, for the most part lawyers, and law is their fetish—their magical cure-all and philosopher's stone. ”

“ Still more naturally may we expect to find in the law-books even an obsequious deference to power, from judges who scarcely ventured to consider it as their duty to defend the subject's freedom, and who beheld the gigantic image of prerogative, in the full play of its hundred arms, constantly before their eyes. ”

“ Any man who shall go into that State can speak and write as much as he pleases against a popular form of government, freedom of suffrage, trial by jury, and against any or all of the institutions just named; he may decry civil liberty, and assert the divine right of kings, and still he does nothing criminal ”

“ And therefore we are still at liberty, at all events, to entertain the belief that the sight of a single politician suffering a felon's doom by the impartial and righteous judgment of a court of law, for the corrupt betrayal of his public trust, would have a more salutary effect than the interested and reckless denunciations of all the party orators and journalists in the world. ”

“ I believe there are thousands, even among those who throng the Tuileries, who would hasten to throw off the mask at the first serious misfortune that should befall the present dynasty, and who would range themselves on the side of what is called legitimacy. ”

“ Undoubtedly that cannot by any means be accounted the perfection of civilized life which sets all legitimate authority boldly at defiance; nor can that be regarded as liberty which, shamefully and by the 'ilest means, spreading false principles, and freely indulging the sensual gratification of lustful desires, claims impunity for all crime and misdemeanor, and thwarts the goodly influence of the worthiest citizens of whatsoever class. ”