r departments take place, we might then hope that
their decisions would, in some measure, restrain the usurpations of the
legislature, and promote progress in the science of law and of
government.

Whether any of our present judges would, (as Mr. Christian suggests they
ought,) "resign their offices" rather than be auxiliary to the execution
of an act of legislation, that, like the edict of Herod, should require
all the children under a certain age to be slain, we cannot certainly
know. But this we do know--that our judges have hitherto manifested no
intention of resigning their offices to avoid declaring it to be law,
that "children of two years old and under," may be wrested forever from
that parental protection which is their birthright, and subjected for
life to outrages which all civilized men must regard as worse than
death.

To proceed with our authorities:--

"Those human laws that annex a punishment to murder, do not at all
increase its moral guilt or superadd any fresh obligation in the forum
of conscience to abstain from its perpetration. Nay, if any human law
should allow or enjoin us to commit it, we are bound to transgress that
human law, or else we must offend both the natural and the
divine."--_Blackstone, Vol. 1, p. 42, 43._

"The law of nations depends entirely upon the rules of _natural law_, or
upon mutual compacts, treaties, leagues and agreements between these
several communities; in the construction also of which compacts, we have
no other rule to resort to, but the law of nature: (that) being the only
one to which all the communities are equally subject."--_Blackstone,
Vol. 1, p. 43._

"Those rights then which God and nature have established, and are
therefore called natural rights, such as are life and liberty, need not
the aid of human laws to be more effectually invested in every man than
they are; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared
by the municipal laws to be inviolable. On the contrary, no human
legislature has power to abridge or destroy them, unless the owner shall
himself commit some act that amounts to a forfeiture."--_Blackstone,
Vol. 1, p. 54._

"By the absolute rights of individuals, we mean those which are so in
their primary and strictest sense; such as would belong to their persons
merely in a state of nature, and which every man is entitled to enjoy,
whether out of society, or in it."--_Blackstone, Vol. 1, p. 123._

"The principal aim of society