
“No government has yet been able to repeal natural laws, though they keep trying.”
Source: Farnham's Freehold (1964), Chapter 2 (p. 35)
1850s, Speech at Peoria, Illinois (1854)
Context: Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature — opposition to it, in his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Compromise — repeal all compromises — repeal the Declaration of Independence — repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature. It still will be the abundance of man's heart, that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.
“No government has yet been able to repeal natural laws, though they keep trying.”
Source: Farnham's Freehold (1964), Chapter 2 (p. 35)
2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution
2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution
1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
Context: The poor people, it is true, have been much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS, for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, — Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws — Rights, derived from the great Legislator of the universe.
Article 9
"Declaration of Rights" http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/PShelley/declarat.html (1812)
1 St. Tr. (N. S.) 484.
Trial of Hunt and others (King v. Hunt) (1820)
1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)
Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Ch. IV Section II - Containing a Disquisition of the Law of Nature, as it respects the Moral System, interspersed with Observations on Subsequent Religions.
Letter to his sister Priscilla (16 February 1846), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London: Constable, 1913), p. 147.
1840s