hat no honest man should engage to uphold them. Who has
the right to construe and expound the laws? Of course the Courts of
the Nation. The Constitution provides (Article 3, Section 2,) that
the Supreme Court shall be the final and only interpreter of its
meaning. What says the Supreme Court? That this clause does relate
to slaves, and order their return. All the other courts concur in
this opinion. But, say some, the courts are corrupt on this question.
Let us appeal to the people. Nine hundred and ninety-nine out of
every thousand answer, that the courts have construed it rightly,
and almost as many cheerfully support it. If the unanimous,
concurrent, unbroken practice of every department of the Government,
judicial, legislative, and executive, and the acquiescence of the
people for fifty years, do not prove which is the true construction,
then how and where can such a question ever be settled? If the
people and the courts of the land do not know what they themselves
mean, who has authority to settle their meaning for them?

If the Constitution is not what history, unbroken practice, and the
courts prove that our fathers intended to make it, and what too,
their descendants, this nation say they did make it, and agree to
uphold,--who shall decide what the Constitution is?

This is the sense then in which the Nation understand that the
promise is made to them. The Nation _understand_ that the judge
pledges himself to return fugitive slaves. The judge knows this when
he takes the oath. And Paley expresses the opinion of all writers on
morals, as well as the conviction of all honest men, when he says,
"that a promise is binding in that sense in which the promiser
thought at the time that the other party understood it."

OBJECTION II.

A promise to do an immoral act is not binding: therefore an oath to
support the Constitution of the United States, does not bind one to
support any provisions of that instrument which are repugnant to his
ideas of right. And an abolitionist, thinking it wrong to return
slaves, may as an office-holder, innocently and properly take an
oath to support a Constitution which commands such return.

ANSWER. Observe that this objection allows the Constitution to be
pro-slavery, and admits that there are clauses in it which no
abolitionist ought to carry out or support.

And observe, further, that we all agree, that a bad promise is
better broken than kept--that every abolitionist, who has be