ISBN: 9781154400571

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1838. Not illustrat… More...

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1838. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... 13 SECTION I. THE RIGHT OF RESISTANCE. With regard to this first question, we must agree with Sir James, that it is what he has called it, a tremendous problem, which, though it requires the calmest exercise of reason to solve, the circumstances which bring it forward commonly call forth mightier agents, which disturb and overpower the action of the understanding. It should seem, then, that in the outset, he announces at least very serious difficulty, if not despair, of ever bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion even in theory, much more in practice. He allows that in conjunctures so awful, men feel more than they reason; that the duty of legal obedience seems to forbid that appeal to arms, which the necessity of preserving law and liberty allows, or rather demands. In such a conflict, therefore, he says, there is little quiet left for moral deliberation. Little, indeed; so little, I should say, that it had been better, perhaps, to have left the subject untouched, as one upon which the attempt were vain to prescribe beforehand rules of moral conduct, in cases which must necessarily be exceptions to all rules. To your penetration and logical mind I need not point out the difficulty, I might say impossibility, of reconciling the law of obedience to the duty of taking arms for the preservation of law. This is a confusion of terms which I own it is beyond me to unravel, though I am very willing to suppose what is meant, that there is a confliction of duties--on one side, the duty of obeying the laws of the land, whatever they may be; on the other, that of obeying moral expediency, or the general precepts of reason and justice, should the laws of the land be not conformable to them. Which of these is the superior, so as to extinguish the other, he leaves no ... Robert Plumer Ward, Books, History, An Historical Essay on the Real Character and Amount of the Precedent of the Revolution of 1688; In Which the Opinions of Mackinto Books>History <