e submits, not because he consents to the wrong,
whether to himself personally or to others, but because he cannot help
it. This will perhaps be denied, with the assertion that willing,
intelligent submission to law, even when unjust, is yielded by most
for the general good. One has, however, only to consider the
disposition of the average man to evade payment of taxes, to recognize
how far force daily enters into the maintenance and execution of law.
Nations, on the contrary, since no force exists, or without their
volition can exist, to compel them to accept the institution of an
authority superior to their own conscience, yield a willing
acquiescence to wrong, when they so yield in obedience to an external
authority imposed by themselves. The matter is not helped by the fact
of a previous promise to accept such decisions. The wrong-doing of an
individual, in consequence of an antecedent promise, does not relieve
the conscience thus rashly fettered. The ancient warning still stands,
"Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin." For the individual
or the nation, arbitration is not possible where the decision may
violate conscience; it therefore can be accepted only when it is known
that interest merely, not duty, will be affected by the judgment, and
such knowledge cannot exist antecedent to the difficulty arising.

There is a further--a second--fallacy in the supposed analogy between
the submission of individuals to law, and the advocated submission of
states to a central tribunal. The law of the state, overwhelming as is
its power relatively to that of the individual citizen, can neither
bind nor loose in matters pertaining to the conscience. Still less can
any tribunal, however solemnly constituted, liberate a state from its
obligation to do right; still less, I say, because the state retains,
what the individual has in great part lost, the power to maintain what
it believes to be right. Many considerations may make it more right--I
do not say _more expedient_--for a man or for a nation, to submit to,
or to acquiesce in, wrong than to resist; but in such cases it is
conscience still that decides where the balance of justice turns
distinctly to the side of wrong. It is, I presume, universally
admitted, that occasions may arise where conscience not only
justifies, but compels, resistance to law; whether it be the Christian
citizen refusing to sacrifice, or the free citizen to subject himself
to unconstitutional ta