from this principle who were combating it, in practice and
speculation. The advocates for a despotic government and
nonresistance to the magistrate employ reasons in favor of their
systems drawn from a consideration of their tendency to promote
public happiness.

The Author of Nature directs all his operations to the production of
the greatest good, and has made human virtue to consist in a
disposition and conduct which tends to the common felicity of his
creatures. An abridgement of the natural freedom of men, by the
institutions of political societies, is vindicable only on this
foot. How absurd, then, is it to draw arguments from the nature of
civil society for the annihilation of those very ends which society
was intended to procure! Men associate for their mutual advantage.
Hence, the good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority
of the members, of any State, is the great standard by which
everything relating to that State must finally be determined; and
though it may be supposed that a body of people may be bound by a
voluntary resignation (which they have been so infatuated as to
make) of all their interests to a single person, or to a few, it can
never be conceived that the resignation is obligatory to their
posterity; because it is manifestly contrary to the good of the
whole that it should be so.

These are the sentiments of the wisest and most virtuous champions
of freedom. Attend to a portion on this subject from a book in our
own defense, written, I had almost said, by the pen of inspiration.
"I lay no stress," says he, "on charters; they derive their rights
from a higher source. It is inconsistent with common sense to
imagine that any people would ever think of settling in a distant