ct of legislation, excepting that legislation which
merely makes regulations, and provides instrumentalities for carrying
other laws into effect, is to overturn natural law, and substitute
for it the arbitrary will of power. In other words, the whole object
of it is to destroy men's rights. At least, such is its only effect;
and its designs must be inferred from its effect. Taking all the
statutes in the country, there probably is not one in a
hundred,--except the auxiliary ones just mentioned,--that does not
violate natural law; that does not invade some right or other.

Yet the advocates of arbitrary legislation are continually practising
the fraud of pretending that unless the legislature _make_ the laws,
the laws will not be known. The whole object of the fraud is to
secure to the government the authority of making laws that never
ought to be known."

In addition to the authority already cited, of Sir William Jones, as to
the certainty of natural law, and the uniformity of men's opinions in
regard to it, I may add the following:

"There is that great simplicity and plainness in the Common Law, that
Lord Coke has gone so far as to assert, (and Lord Bacon nearly
seconds him in observing,) that 'he never knew two questions arise
merely upon common law; but that they were mostly owing to statutes
ill-penned and overladen with provisos.'"--_3 Eunomus_, 157-8.

If it still be said that juries would disagree, as to what was natural
justice, and that one jury would decide one way, and another jury
another; the answer is, that such a thing is hardly credible, as that
twelve men, taken at random from the people at large, should
_unanimously_ decide a question of natural justice one way, and that
twelve other men, selected in the same manner, should _unanimously_
decide the same question the other way, _unless they were misled by the
justices_. If, however, such things should sometimes happen, from any
cause whatever, the remedy is by appeal, and new trial.

[Footnote 73: Judges do not even live up to that part of their own
maxim, which requires jurors to try the matter of fact. By dictating to
them the laws of evidence,--that is, by dictating what evidence they may
hear, and what they may not hear, and also by dictating to them rules
for weighing such evidence as they permit them to hear,--they of
necessity dictate the conclusion to which they shall arrive. And thus
t