[9] This opinion was repeated by Lord Hardwick, sitting as Chancellour, twenty years after it had been given, with additional assurances, and under the fullest conviction of its strict conformity to the law.
[10] It is said, Lex est summa ratio. I am sorry that so excellent a rule of law should admit of contradiction; and I wish that this was the only instance of an exception: but, let it be considered, whether our Game laws, our Marriage acts, and, for the most part, the penal laws of this country, cum multis aliis quæ, &c. are not contrary both to reason and nature.
[11] “It is laid down,” says Judge Blackstone, that “acts of parliament contrary to reason are void: but if the parliament will positively enact a thing to be done which is unreasonable, I know of no power that can controul it.”——V. his Comm. Vol. I. p. 91.
[12] Vid. his Essay on Man.
[13] Vid. his Journ. to Paris.
[14] Vid. his Essay on Human Understanding.
[15] Vid. his Moral Philosophy.
[16] In looking into Mr. Hume’s Essays, particularly the one of national characters (which I had never seen till after the above argument was finished) I was made happy to observe the ideas of so ingenious a writer corresponding with my own: but as we differ in some respects, and much of what I have suggested has been not at all taken notice of by him, I shall beg leave to insert here what he has said upon the subject. “There is,” says he, “some reason to think, that all nations, which live beyond the polar circles, or betwixt the tropics, are inferior to the rest of the species, and are utterly incapable of all the higher attainments of the human mind.” Upon which he has the following note: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.” Now I do not apprehend, that, in order to have different species of men, it is at all necessary to have four or five different kinds. I infer, that there is but one genus or kind of man (under the term mankind) subordinate to which there are several sorts or species of men, differing from each other upon the principle that I have assigned; and, as Hudibras says,
If one will do,
What need of two?