interpreted them, and done it very honestly too; but in reality our institutions are fundamentally distinct from the English, based on an entirely different idea; and instead of interpreting our bills of rights as grants, we ought to interpret them as an attempted inventory, more or less exact, of the natural rights of man; and our constitutions, instead of compacts, should be regarded as attempts to determine and fix the legitimate powers of government. They are shields interposed between the minority and the majority, between the individual and the people. The people say to the individual, and the majority say to the minority, by these instruments, not merely that they will exercise their authority according to the rules herein specified, but that, errors excepted, they have no right to exercise it according to any other rules. Constitutions are not needed by majorities; they are needed merely as a moral force by the minority, who want the physical force to protect themselves against the aggressions of the majority. They are not needed, as some suppose, to constitute the people a body politic. The people are as much a body politic, before assembling in convention and adopting a constitution as afterwards. Bodies politic, rights of societies or of individuals, are not things to be created by a few arbitrary slopes, curves, and angles on parchment. Right and wrong, for governments, individuals, and societies, for cities and citizens, are eternal and immutable.

For ourselves, we have no patience with the notion that we hold our liberties as grants. We do not like to be sent to rummage in the dark and dusty cabinets of old state papers, and to decipher old worm-eaten parchments, in order to find out what our liberties are, and what is the authority by which we may legitimate them. The charter, by virtue of which we legitimate our rights, is no charter engrossed on parchment, but one which God Almighty has engrossed on the human. heart. The Magna Charta, to which we appeal, is no grant forced from king John, king Edward, king Har

ry, king William, nor any other king, from no hierarchy, no aristocracy, from no democracy or conventions of the people, but that which God gave us, when he made us men, and by virtue of which we are men. We consult no constitution to learn what our rights and duties are, but the constitution of human nature itself. And all constitutions which do aught but faithfully transcribe that, we declare null and void from the beginning. We are free, not because the king wills, not because it is the good pleasure of the nobility, not because the priesthood grants permission, not because the people in convention ordain, but because we are men. It is not a privilege of American citizenship, but a right of universal Humanity.

By assuming this position, democracy gains a vantage ground for Humanity. If we hold our rights not by virtue of compacts, grants, or decrees of conventions, then we hold them by virtue of our human nature. Our rights and duties belong to us as men, as human beings. Then all who are men, human beings, have the same rights and duties. If all have the same rights and duties, then, in matter of right and duty, all men are equal. Hence, the grand, the thrilling, tyrant-killing doctrine of EQUALITY, THE

DOCTRINE THAT MAN MEASURES MAN THE WORLD OVER.

Men may be diverse in their tastes, dispositions, capacities, and acquirements; but so long as they all have the same rights and the same duties, so long it may be affirmed of them with truth, that they are equal one to another, in all respects in which equality does not tend to lose itself in identity. This doctrine will not remain unfruitful.

If all men have equal rights and duties as individuals, then is society bound to treat them as equals. If she exalt one or depress another, confer a favor on this one and not on that, place one in a more favorable position for the enjoyment of his rights or the performance of his duties than another, then is she partial, and therefore unjust, therefore illegitimate; then does she disturb the original equality, which God

established between man and man, and therefore does she become an usurper, to be driven back to her legitimate province. This rule is broad; it reaches far, but society will one day observe it.

No government or society has ever yet respected this equality. In the Grecian and Roman city, the individual, as we have seen, counted for nothing. There were municipal rights, but no rights of man. The city might do what it pleased. The same remark may be made of all aristocratic and monarchical governments. All, like the English parliament, have called themselves omnipotent, have usurped all the rights of man, and claimed them, as their own property. Claiming, as their own property, all possible rights susceptible of being exercised by individuals, they have claimed, as a natural consequence of this, the right to parcel out the exercise of these rights to individuals or to corporations, as they pleased. Hence PRIVILEGE, a private law, by which authority confers a special favor, or grants to an individual or a corporation, the right to do what he or it had not the right to do before, or exempts him or it from a duty, which was previously obligatory. Authority, under the character of a privilege, confers on this man the exclusive right of baking all the bread for a given number of people, upon that one the right to distil corn into whiskey, upon this company the exclusive right to buy and sell slaves, and upon that one the right to traffic at a certain place in certain kinds of foreign productions, upon this one the right to wear a certain ribbon or garter, and of receiving the income of certain lands or offices. We need not be particular on this head. Society is and ever has been filled, and covered over, with privileges of every name and na

ture.

Our first emotion, on contemplating this immense system of privilege, which has grown up through successive ages, is that of indignation. We go even so far as to rail at the privileged, and to charge the whole to their selfishness and rapacity. But after

a while, after having penetrated more deeply into the matter, we calm ourselves, and suppres our wrath and indignation. The evil lies not at the door of the privileged alone. Few, at least not many, of the unprivileged would have refused to accept these privileges, had they been offered them. Of those who

declaim against privilege now, not the smallest half do it somewhat on the principle that the fox declaimed against the grapes. The error is not in the privileged, the evil is not in the fact that one set of men rather than another enjoy the privileges; but in the fact that authority ever presumed to have any privileges to grant, any favors to confer The evil lies not in the fact that privileges have been conferred, but in the fact that governments have been allowed to usurp, and hold as its own, all the rights of the people as individuals. Having usurped these rights, having robbed them from individuals, governments could, perhaps, do no better than to parcel them out under the name of privilege. It was only under this name, only by favor, that individuals could get back some portion of that of which authority had robbed them. Unequal as this must necessarily be, in its bearing on the whole mass of individuals, it was nevertheless better to get back something in this way, than to be left entirely destitute. He, who has been robbed of his all by the highwayman, can sometimes do no better than to accept back part of the contents of his purse as a present.

It is true that what was granted as a favor, should, if granted at all, have been granted as a right; but every favor granted weakened, in the end, the government which granted it, and did something towards raising it up a successful rival. Every individual who became one of the privileged, became one who would not easily be reduced to slavery again. When the crisis came between him and authority, he would claim his privilege as his right, and defend it with his life. Paradoxical as it may seem, modern liberty is the natural, if not the legitimate, child of privilege.

These special grants and monopolies, which are so abhorrent to democracy, have been the means, or one of the means, by which the mighty Demos has broken himself loose from the grasp of the monarch, and become strong enough, and wise enough, to demand, as his right, what he had formerly been proud and most thankful to receive as a boon. These special grants and monopolies have, in reality, been victories gained by the people over their masters, so many provinces wrested from the dominion of the usurper. The system of privilege, therefore, though founded on usurpation, and unjust and unequal in its bearing, has been the means, or one of the means, under God, of carrying onward the progress of society, and of restoring to individuals, in some measure, the exercise of rights of which authority had violently dispossessed

them.

But while we admit all this, while we admit and even contend, that during the past under the circumstances which existed, privilege was one of the means by which individual freedom was to be obtained, we contend that Democracy is right, to-day, and in this country, in asserting herself, as she does in the Address before us, as "equality against privilege." For a time privilege was to be resorted to, as we sometimes resort to one evil to cure another; but it needs no argument to prove that that time has gone by, and that the doctrine of privilege has ceased to be the doctrine of progress. Humanity demands to-day her rights; she has ceased to solicit favors. She makes no war upon the privileged few; for, aside from their character as the privileged, they are her children and equally as dear to her heart as any of the other members of her vast family; but she proclaims in a voice which all must hear and shall respect, that all which any one may, in obedience to justice, enjoy, he may demand as a right, and that he needs no patent from human authority, to empower him to do whatever is right in the sight of God, and that all the patents in the world cannot make it just for him to do what in the sight of God it is wrong for him to do.