Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/253

Rh might of the lifted arm,"—would they have the moral right to kill, stab, butcher whomsoever they pleased?

But that is supposing all this wickedness done without the form of an elected legislature. Then suppose the actual legislatures of the nation should revise the Constitution and delegate the power to those persons to do that work and make statutes for the protection of lewdness, fraud, and butchery,—would it then be the moral duty of the rulers to enforce those statutes; and of the people to submit? Just as much as it is the moral duty of men to enforce any wicked statute made under the present Constitution of the United States and by the present legislators. The principle is false. It is only justified on the idea that there is no God, and this world is a chaos. But yet it is taught; and only last Sunday the minister of a "prominent church" taught that every law must be executed, right or wrong, and thanked the soldiers who, with their bayonets, forced an innocent man to slavery. No matter how unjust a statute is, it must be enforced and obeyed so long as it is on the law book!

Human law in general is a useful and indispensable instrument; but because a special statute has been made for injustice, is it to be used for injustice?Massachusetts has some thousands of muskets in the arsenal at Cambridge; but because they were made to shoot with, shall I take them to kill my neighbours; shall the governor order the soldiers to shoot down the citizens? It is no worse to do injustice with a gun than to do injustice with a statute. It is not merely the means by which the wicked end is reached that is wicked, it is the end itself; and if the means is a thing otherwise good, the wicked end makes its use atrocious. What is the statute in the one case but a tool, and the gun a tool in the other case? The instrument is not to be blamed, and the statute is no more to be used for a wicked purpose than the gun; a State statute no more than a State gun. Medicine is a very useful thing. But will you, therefore, go into an apothecary's shop and take his drugs at random? If you are killed by a poison it is no better because called "medicine."

But the notion that every statute must be enforced is historically false. Who enforces the Sunday law in Mas-