ot
of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps
unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to
comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be
consenting to their moral relation; but, consenting or not, they are
bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those with whom they
have never made a convention of any sort. Children are not consenting to
their relation; but their relation, without their actual consent, binds
them to its duties,--or rather it implies their consent, because the
presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the
predisposed order of things. Men come in that manner into a community
with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits,
loaded with all the duties of their situation. If the social ties and
ligaments, spun out of those physical relations which are the elements
of the commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue,
independently of our will, so, without any stipulation on our own part,
are we bound by that relation called our country, which comprehends (as
it has been well said) "all the charities of all."[21] Nor are we left
without powerful instincts to make this duty as dear and grateful to us
as it is awful and coercive. Our country is not a thing of mere physical
locality. It consists, in a great measure, in the ancient order into
which we are born. We may have the same geographical situation, but
another country; as we may have the same country in another soil. The
place that determines our duty to our country is a social, civil
relation.

These are the opinions of the author whose cause I defend. I lay them
down, not to enforce them upon others by disputation, but as an account
of his proceedings. On them he acts; and from them he is convinced that
neither he, nor any man, or number of men, have a right (except what
necessity, which is out of and above all rule, rather imposes than
bestows) to free themselves from that primary engagement into which
every man born into a community as much contracts by his being born into
it as he contracts an obligation to certain parents by his having been
derived from their bodies. The place of every man determines his duty.
If you ask, _Quem te Deus esse jussit_? you will be answered when you
resolve this other question, _Humana qua parte locatus es in re_?[22]

I admit, indeed, that in morals, as in all things else, difficulties
wil