, is one of the
best gifts of God to man. But liberty, despoiled of law, is a wild,
dark, fierce spirit of licentiousness, which tends "to uproar the
universal peace."

Hence it is a frightful error to regard the civil state or government as
antagonistic to the natural liberty of mankind; for this is, indeed, the
author of the very liberty we enjoy. Good government it is that
restrains the elements of tyranny and oppression, and introduces liberty
into the world. Good government it is that shuts out the reign of
anarchy, and secures the dominion of equity and goodness. He who would
spurn the restraints of law, then, by which pride, and envy, and hatred,
and malice, ambition, and revenge are kept within the sacred bounds of
eternal justice,--he, we say, is not the friend of human liberty. He
would open the flood-gates of tyranny and oppression; he would mar the
harmony and extinguish the light of the world. Let no such man be
trusted.

If the foregoing remarks be just, it would follow that the state of
nature, as it is called, would be one of the most unnatural states in
the world. We may conceive it to exist, for the sake of illustration or
argument; but if it should actually exist, it would be at war with the
law of nature itself. For this requires, as we have seen, that men
should unite together, and frame such laws as the general good demands.

Not only the law, but the very necessities of nature, enjoin the
institution of civil government. God himself has thus laid the
foundations of civil society deep in the nature of man. It is an
ordinance of Heaven, which no human decree can reverse or annul. It is
not a thing of compacts, bound together by promises and paper, but is
itself a law of nature as irreversible as any other. Compacts may give
it one form or another, but in one form or another it must exist. It is
no accidental or artificial thing, which may be made or unmade, which
may be set up or pulled down, at the mere will and pleasure of man. It
is a decree of God; the spontaneous and irresistible working of that
nature, which, in all climates, through all ages, and under all
circumstances, manifests itself in social organizations.

Sec. VI. _Inherent and inalienable rights._

Much has been said about inherent and inalienable rights, which is
either unintelligible or rests upon no solid foundation. "The
inalienable rights of men" is a phrase often brandished by certain
reformers, who aim to bring about "