ot the moral qualities of human action,
the rule of your justice.

These strange incongruities must ever perplex those who confound the
unhappiness of civil dissension with the crime of treason. Whenever a
rebellion really and truly exists, which is as easily known in fact as
it is difficult to define in words, government has not entered into such
military conventions, but has ever declined all intermediate treaty
which should put rebels in possession of the law of nations with regard
to war. Commanders would receive no benefits at their hands, because
they could make no return for them. Who has ever heard of capitulation,
and parole of honor, and exchange of prisoners in the late rebellions in
this kingdom? The answer to all demands of that sort was, "We can engage
for nothing; you are at the king's pleasure." We ought to remember,
that, if our present enemies be in reality and truth rebels, the king's
generals have no right to release them upon any conditions whatsoever;
and they are themselves answerable to the law, and as much in want of a
pardon, for doing so, as the rebels whom they release.

Lawyers, I know, cannot make the distinction for which I contend;
because they have their strict rule to go by. But legislators ought to
do what lawyers cannot; for they have no other rules to bind them but
the great principles of reason and equity and the general sense of
mankind. These they are bound to obey and follow, and rather to enlarge
and enlighten law by the liberality of legislative reason than to fetter
and bind their higher capacity by the narrow constructions of
subordinate, artificial justice. If we had adverted to this, we never
could consider the convulsions of a great empire, not disturbed by a
little disseminated faction, but divided by whole communities and
provinces, and entire legal representatives of a people, as fit matter
of discussion under a commission of Oyer and Terminer. It is as opposite
to reason and prudence as it is to humanity and justice.

This act, proceeding on these principles, that is, preparing to end the
present troubles by a trial of one sort of hostility under the name of
piracy, and of another by the name of treason, and executing the act of
Henry the Eighth according to a new and unconstitutional interpretation,
I have thought evil and dangerous, even though the instruments of
effecting such purposes had been merely of a neutral quality.

But it really appears to me that the me