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 after empowering Congress to make all needful rules and regulations in respect to the public property, the Constitution had continued; "and Congress shall have no power to make rules and regulations in respect to private persons," the prohibition to interfere with the social and domestic relations of the people of the Territories, would, according to accepted causes of construction, have been no more distinct and palpable, no more a thing of which courts are bound to take notice, than it is at present.

The question here to be presented is one of morals. It is the most essential and fundamental of moral questions; that of the right of a system of social and domestic order, established by the consent of its factors, and in harmonious existence, to continue unsubverted by exterior force, though clothed with a color of authority. The question includes an inquiry into the ultimate law of human society; the substratum and sanction of all laws of convention—statutes and constitutions—and the basis of the social, domestic and industrial economies; in short, the unwritten common law of humanity. There is such a law. It is the law which mankind represent, not in their doctrines, theories, bigotries or sentimentalisms, but in their lives; it is the law of constitution and character, not of faith, dogma or opinion.

Philosophers, in all ages, have exercised their ingenuities in attempts to formulate and establish an absolute standard of moral quantities, and always without success; each fresh systematizer starting from the predicate, that all past efforts had proved abortive. It needs an extensive study of systems, of so called moral science, to comprehend the persistency of the inquest, and the variety of the conclusions to which different scholastics have arrived. Thus—for a few examples—Aquinas made the ultimate rule in morals to depend upon "the nature of things;" Scotus upon "the authority of God;" Hobbes upon "the authority of the state;" Puffendorff upon "right reason among men;" Cumberland upon "natural laws independent of experience;" Cudworth upon "the eternal and immortal distinction of right and and wrong in the mind of God;" Malebranche upon "the law of universal order as it eternally existed in the Divine reason;" Shaftesbury upon the "moral sense;" Wollaston upon "the truth of things;" Adam Clarke upon "the fitness of things;" Adam Smith upon "the principle of sympathy;" Hume upon "utility;" Le Rochefoucauld upon "interest;" Helvetius upon "self love;" Kant upon "the highest happiness;" Fichte upon