Cambridge, Mass.
RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND POLITICAL DUTIES.
What is morally wrong cannot be made practically right. The laws of morality are taught in the Bible; they are unchangeable truths; no sophistry, no expediency, no compromise can set them aside.
If politics are the science of government, and if civil government is a divine institution, intended to protect the rights of all; if “an injury done to the meanest subject is an injury done to the whole body;” and if “rulers must be just, ruling in the fear of God,” all legislation should be based on moral duty. Any enactments that have not this basis are, in the Divine sight, null and void. If man is endowed by nature with inalienable rights, no legislation can rightfully wrest them from him. Any attempt to do it is an infraction of the moral law. Our religious, moral, and political duties are identical and inseparable. It is the duty of all Christian legislators so to act now, as they know all must act when truth and righteousness shall have a universal prevalence on the earth.
WHY SLAVERY IS IN THE CONSTITUTION.
That the constitution of a country should guide its actions is a truism which none, perhaps, will be inclined to controvert. Indeed, so thoroughly is this sentiment inwrought into us, that we generally expect practice will conform to the constitution. But does not this subject States or nations to misapprehension by others? South Carolina, for instance, abolishes the writ of habeas corpus with regard to the coloured people, and imprisons them, although citizens of the other States, when they enter her borders in any way. Now these are direct violations of the constitution of the United States, so direct that they cannot be explained away. Nor do we think that South Carolina even attempts it. She openly says, that it is owing to the existence of slavery among them, that the free coloured man, coming into contact with the slaves, will taint them with notions of liberty which will make them discontented—that therefore her own preservation, the first law of nature, requires her to do everything she can to keep the disturbing force out of her limits, even if she have to violate the constitution of the United States. This she asserts, too, when, at the formation of the constitution, she was one of the large slave-holding States—when she had before her the example of every nation that had practised slavery, and when now her senators and representatives in Congress are sworn to support the Constitution of the Union. Thus we see that it would be doing injustice to the constitution, were we to judge of it by the practice of South Carolina.
But the inquirer will not be satisfied with the South Carolina reason. He wants something more and better. He says, too, that these give good occasion to those exercising the powers of the government to confirm all law-abiding citizens in the belief that they are well protected by the constitution, and to let the world see how much the United States prize it. But supposing he were told that those who control the government feel, in this matter with South Carolina,—that those who had the control of the government had no power to coerce South Carolina to perform her duty,—indeed, in a partizan view, that the person injured were no party,—that, as a general thing, they could not even vote,—were unimportant, nay, insignificant. If those reasons will not satisfy him, he must be content with them, for it is not likely that he will get any other. We further see that injustice would be done by considering the practice of a people as fairly representing their constitution.
A constitution—the organic law—in truth, all other law is, in some degree, a restraint on men. It makes an umpire of right, of reason, which, if not the same in degree in all of us, is the same in nature. Yet it must be, to some extent, a restraint on the desires or selfish passions of men. In fact, it is only carrying out the rule of doing to others what they should do to us, and tends not only to preserve, but advance society. If no constitution or law agreeing with it existed, men would be left to the sway of their own passions—nearly always selfish—and they being many, and very different in different persons, sometimes, indeed, altogether opposite, and of various intensity—would, by their indulgence, tend to confusion, to the deterioration of society, and to its ultimate dissolution.