acious a thing
was never attempted by man.

_He_ have arbitrary power! My Lords, the East India Company have not
arbitrary power to give him; the king has no arbitrary power to give
him; your Lordships have not; nor the Commons, nor the whole
legislature. We have no arbitrary power to give, because arbitrary power
is a thing which neither any man can hold nor any man can give. No man
can lawfully govern himself according to his own will; much less can one
person be governed by the will of another. We are all born in
subjection,--all born equally, high and low, governors and governed, in
subjection to one great, immutable, preexistent law, prior to all our
devices and prior to all our contrivances, paramount to all our ideas
and all our sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we
are knit and connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of
which we cannot stir.

This great law does not arise from our conventions or compacts; on the
contrary, it gives to our conventions and compacts all the force and
sanction they can have. It does not arise from our vain institutions.
Every good gift is of God; all power is of God; and He who has given the
power, and from whom alone it originates, will never suffer the exercise
of it to be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power
itself. If, then, all dominion of man over man is the effect of the
Divine disposition, it is bound by the eternal laws of Him that gave it,
with which no human authority can dispense,--neither he that exercises
it, nor even those who are subject to it; and if they were mad enough to
make an express compact that should release their magistrate from his
duty, and should declare their lives, liberties, and properties
dependent upon, not rules and laws, but his mere capricious will, that
covenant would be void. The acceptor of it has not his authority
increased, but he has his crime doubled. Therefore can it be imagined,
if this be true, that He will suffer this great gift of government, the
greatest, the best, that was ever given by God to mankind, to be the
plaything and the sport of the feeble will of a man, who, by a
blasphemous, absurd, and petulant usurpation, would place his own
feeble, contemptible, ridiculous will in the place of the Divine wisdom
and justice?

The title of conquest makes no difference at all. No conquest can give
such a right; for conquest, that is, force, cannot convert its own
injustice into a jus