Page:Essay on the First Principles of Government 2nd Ed.djvu/148

 the exact boundaries of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms in nature, which yet naturalists find to be impossible. But a happy circumstance it is for human society, that, in religion and morals, there is no necessity to distinguish them at all. The more important will guard themselves by their own evidence, and the less important do not deserve to be guarded.

Political principles, indeed, may require penal sanctions; but then it is for the very same reason that religious and moral principles require none. It is because they do not carry their own evidence along with them. Governments actually established must guard themselves by penalties and intolerance, because forms of government, and persons presiding in them, being nearly arbitrary, it may not be very evident that a different government, or different governors, would not be better for a state. Laws relating to treason are to be considered as arising from the principle of self-preservation. But even with