very life of the authority
by which he holds all he calls his own? It must be true of human, as well
as of the Divine law, that he who offends in one point is guilty of all.
The severence of one link breaks the whole chain. There is no medium
between complete submission to every constitutional ordinance, or rightful
and violent revolution against the whole political system. But if such
inconsistency can be charged on him who claims the right of property in
land, although that, too, is beginning to be disputed, with how much more
force does it press on the man who asserts property, or--if a less odious
term is preferred--authority, in persons? We do not dispute his claim. It
comes from the common source of all human authority, whether of man over
man, or of man to the exclusion of man from a challenged domain. But
certainly _his_ title can have no other foundation than the political
institutions of the country maintained in all their coherent integrity;
and, therefore, he who asserts it should be very conservative, he should
be very reverent of law in all its departments, he should be very tender
of breaking Constitutions, he should hold in the highest honor the
decisions of an interpreting judiciary. He should, in short, be the very
last man ever to talk of revolution, or nullification, or secession, or of
any thing else that may in the least impair the sacredness or stability of
constitutional law.

Call government, then, what we will, social compact, divine institution,
natural growth of time and circumstances--conceive of it under any
form--still there is ever the same essential idea. It is ever one absolute,
earthly, sovereign power, acting, within a certain territory, as the
sanction and guaranty of all civil or political rights, in other words, of
all rights that can not exist without it. There may be many intermediate
links in the chain, but it is only by virtue of this, in the last appeal,
that one man has the exclusive right to the house in which he lives, or to
the land which he occupies. Hence alone, too, are all the _civil_ rights
of marriage and the domestic relations. The family is born of the state.
On this account, says Socrates, may it be held that _the law has begotten
us_, and we may be justly called its sons. There is the same idea in the
maxim of Cicero, _In aris et focis est respublica_; and in this thought we
find the peculiar malignity of that awful crime of treason. It is a
_breach of trust_, and