f legal remedy, the best citizens of all parties organized
themselves under the direction of a Committee of Safety, forcibly deposed
the municipal magistrates and judges, brought well-known criminals to
trial, conviction, and punishment, reestablished the integrity of
suffrage, and resigned their power to functionaries lawfully elected,
under whom and their successors the city has enjoyed a degree of order,
tranquillity, and safety at least equal to that of any other great city on
the continent.

*The right of revolution* undoubtedly is inherent in a national body
politic; but it is an extreme right, and is to be exercised only under the
most urgent necessity. Its conditions cannot be strictly defined, and its
exercise can, perhaps, be justified only by its results. A constitutional
government can seldom furnish occasion for violent revolutionary measures;
for every constitution has its own provisions for legal amendment, and the
public sentiment ripe for revolution can hardly fail to be strong enough
to carry the amendments which it craves, through the legal processes,
which, if slow and cumbrous, are immeasurably preferable to the employment
of force and the evils of civil war. On the other hand, a despotic or
arbitrary government may admit of abrogation only by force; and if its
administration violates private rights, imposes unrighteous burdens and
disabilities, suppresses the development of the national resources, and
supersedes the administration of justice or the existence of equitable
relations between class and class or between man and man, the people--the
rightful source and arbiter of government--has manifestly the right to
assert its own authority, and to substitute a constitution and rulers of
its own choice for the sovereignty which has betrayed its trust. Under
similar oppression, the same right unquestionably exists in a remote
colony, or in a nation subject by conquest to a foreign power. If that
power refuses the rights and privileges of subjects to a people over which
it exercises sovereignty, and governs it in its own imagined interests,
with a systematic and persistent disregard to the well-being of the people
thus governed, resistance is a right, and may become a duty. In fine, the
function of government is the maintenance of just and beneficent order; a
government forfeits its rights when it is false to this function; and the
rights thus forfeited revert to the misgoverned people.