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logues of those of the material universe. As no stream can rise to a level higher than that of the fountain from which it flows, so no government can attain to an eminence in virtue superior to that occupied by its creators; and every claim to such transcendence only testifies how inadequately its ministers comprehend its principles and purposes, and how unfit they are to be entrusted with its authorities.
Even if it were in the nature of things possible to endow a government with power to prescribe to its subjects the terms upon which to order their social and domestic relations, and to punish them in case of recusancy, every principle which is fundamental in a popular government would insist that such power should be exercised only in conformity with the will of the components of the body politic to be affected by such prescription. Any other rule than this is a rule of despotism. If Congress had the authority to enact statutes regulative of the personal relations of the people of the Territories, and should exercise such authority in any other way or to any other extent, than the people of the Territories would legislate for themselves, it would commit an act of absolutism more wild and mischievous than, upon their loyal subjects, any of those "effete dynasties of the old world," which are permitted to figure so extensively in the United States, on the day of the national harlequinade, ever attempted. There could be no course of reasoning presented, or line of precedents consistent with the principles of human right adduced, by which such an act could be justified or even excused.
But there is no such power. There can be none. No government ever possessed it. No people ever conferred it upon their government. No government, so far as history records, but that of the United States ever attempted its exercise. It is altogether without a precedent in the annals even of despotism. Nowhere but upon this continent, and here, under the pressure of a fanaticism that is as ignorant as it is conceited, and as irrational as it is inexorable, has the idea been conceived that it is the purpose and the duty of government to burrow beneath its own foundations and to disintegrate and re-order the basis upon which it was constructed. The dynamics of the moral are the analogues of those of the material universe. In the latter, the result would be the destruction of the edifice; can it be anything less than anarchy in the former?
The social condition is the common law of the land; a law which antedates and dominates every law of convention. It is
