it, as on other sciences. The decisions of courts, containing
their opinions upon the almost endless variety of cases that have
come before them, are reported; and these reports are condensed,
codified, and digested, so as to give, in a small compass, the facts,
and the opinions of the courts as to the law resulting from them. And
these treatises, codes, and digests are open to be read of all men.
And a man has the same excuse for being ignorant of arithmetic, or
any other science, that he has for being ignorant of natural law. He
can learn it as well, if he will, without its being enacted, as he
could if it were.

If our governments would but themselves adhere to natural law, there
would be little occasion to complain of the ignorance of the people
in regard to it. The popular ignorance of law is attributable mainly
to the innovations that have been made upon natural law by
legislation; whereby our system has become an incongruous mixture of
natural and statute law, with no uniform principle pervading it. To
learn such a system,--if system it can be called, and if learned it
can be,--is a matter of very similar difficulty to what it would be
to learn a system of mathematics, which should consist of the
mathematics of nature, interspersed with such other mathematics as
might be created by legislation, in violation of all the natural
principles of numbers and quantities.

But whether the difficulties of learning natural law be greater or
less than here represented, they exist in the nature of things, and
cannot be removed. Legislation, instead of removing, only increases
them. This it does by innovating upon natural truths and principles,
and introducing jargon and contradiction, in the place of order,
analogy, consistency, and uniformity.

Further than this; legislation does not even profess to remove the
obscurity of natural law. That is no part of its object. It only
professes to substitute something arbitrary in the place of natural
law. Legislators generally have the sense to see that legislation
will not make natural law any clearer than it is. Neither is it the
object of legislation to establish the authority of natural law.
Legislators have the sense to see that they can add nothing to the
authority of natural law, and that it will stand on its own
authority, unless they overturn it.

The whole obje