pretended to delegate power to them. And men who are legally responsible to nobody for their acts, cannot truly be said to be the agents of any body, or to be exercising any power but their own; for all real agents are necessarily responsible both to those on whom they act, and to those for whom they act.

To say that the people of this country ever have bound, or ever could bind, themselves by any contract whatever—the Constitution, or any other—to thus give away all their natural rights of property, liberty, and life, into the hands of a few men—a mere conclave—and that they should make it a part of the contract itself that these few men should be held legally irresponsible for the disposal they should make of those rights, is an utter absurdity. It is to say that they have bound themselves, and that they could bind themselves, by an utterly idiotic and suicidal contract.

If such a contract had ever been made by one private individual to another, and had been signed, sealed, witnessed, acknowledged, and delivered, with all possible legal formalities, no decent court on earth—certainly none in this country—would have regarded it, for a moment, as conveying any right, or delegating any power, or as having the slightest legal validity, or obligation.

For all the reasons now given, and for still others that might be given, the legislative power now exercised by Congress is, in both law and reason, a purely personal, arbitrary, irresponsible, usurped dominion on the part of the legislators themselves, and not a power delegated to them by anybody.

Yet under the pretense that this instrument gives them the right of an arbitrary and irresponsible dominion over the whole people of the United States, Congress has now gone on, for ninety years and more, filling great volumes with laws of their own device, which the people at large have never read, nor even seen, nor ever will read or see; and of whose legal meanings it is morally impossible that they should ever know anything. Congress has never dared to require the people even to read these laws. Had it done so, the oppression would have been an intolerable one; and the people, rather than endure it, would have either rebelled, and overthrown the government, or would have fled the country. Yet these laws, which Congress has not dared to require the people even to read, it has compelled them, at the point of the bayonet, to obey.

And this moral, and legal, and political monstrosity is the kind of government which Congress claims that the Constitution authorizes it to impose upon the people.

Sir, can you say that such an arbitrary and irresponsible dominion as this, over the properties, liberties, and lives of fifty millions of people—or even over the property, liberty, or life of any one of those fifty millions—can be justified on any reason whatever? If not, with what color of truth can you say that you yourself, or anybody else, can act as a legislator, under the Constitution of the United States, and yet be an honest man?

To say that the arbitrary and irresponsible dominion, that is exercised by Congress, has been delegated to it by the Constitution, and not solely by the secret ballots of the voters for the time being, is the height of absurdity; for what is the Constitution? It is, at best, a writing that was drawn up more than ninety years ago; was assented to at the time only by a small number of men; generally those few white male adults who had prescribed amounts of property; probably not more than two hundred thousand in all; or one in twenty of the whole population.

Those men have been long since dead. They never had any right of arbitrary dominion over even their contemporaries; and they never had any over us. Their wills or wishes have no more rightful authority over us, than have the wills or wishes of men who lived before the flood. They never personally signed, sealed, acknowledged, or delivered, or dared to