Note 211 — SPEECH. (continued 2)

Relation of the Imprisonment of Mr. John Bunyan, written by Himself: Works (Glasgow, 1853), Vol. I. pp. 59, 60. Balmez, the Spanish divine, whose vindication of the early Catholic Church is a remarkable monument, declares, after careful discussion, "that the rights of the civil power are limited, that there are things beyond its province,—cases in which a man may say, and ought to say, I will not obey." (Protestantism and Catholicity Compared, Ch. 54.) Devices to avoid the enforcement of unjust laws illustrate this righteous disobedience,—as where English juries, before the laws had been made humane, found an article stolen to be less than five shillings in value, in order to save the criminal from capital punishment. In the Diary of John Adams, December 14, 1779, at Ferrol, in Spain, there is a curious instance of law requiring that a convicted parricide should be headed up in a hogshead with an adder, a toad, a dog, and a cat, and then cast into the sea; but in a case that had recently occurred the barbarous law was evaded by painting these animals on a hogshead containing the dead body of the criminal. (Works, Vol. III. p. 233.) In similar spirit, the famous President Jeannin, high in the magistracy and diplomacy of France, when called to a consultation on a mandate of Charles the Ninth, at the epoch of St. Bartholomew, said, "We must obey the sovereign slowly, when he commands in anger"; and he concluded by asking "letters patent before executing orders so cruel." (Biographie Universelle, art. Jeannin Pierre.) The remark of Casimir Périer, when Prime-Minister, to Queen Hortense, that it might be "legal" for him to arrest her, but not "just," makes the same distinction. (Guizot, Mémoires pour servir à l'Histoire de mon Temps, Tom. II. p. 219. See ante. Vol. II. pp. 398, 399.) The case is stated with perfect moderation by Grotius, when he says that human laws have a binding force only when they are made in a humane manner, not if they impose a burden which is plainly abhorrent to reason and Nature,—non si onus injungant quod a ratione et natura plane abhorreat. (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Lib. III. Cap. XXIII. v. 3; also Lib. I. Cap. IV. vii. 2, 3.) These latter words aptly describe the "burden" imposed by the Slave Act.