Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/262

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS

miserable sophistical shifts which have attended this wretched business from the beginning, there is none more miserable than this.

Mr. President, this is the eternal law of human nature. You may struggle against it, you may try to escape it, you may persuade yourself that your intentions are benevolent, that your yoke will be easy and your burden will be light, but it will assert itself again. Government without the consent of the government — an authority which heaven never gave — can only be supported by means which heaven never can sanction.

The American people have got this one ques- tion to answer. They may answer it now; they can take ten years, or twenty years, or a genera- tion, or a century to think of it. But it will not down. They must answer it in the end: Can you lawfully buy with money, or get by brute force of arms, the right to hold in subjuga- tion an unwilling people, and to impose on them such constitution as you, and not they, think best for them.

We have answered this question a good many times in the past. The fathers answered it in 1776, and founded the Republic upon their an- swer, which has ])oen the corner-stone. John Quincy Adams and James Monroe answered it again in the ^Monroe doctrine, which John Quincy Adams declared was only the doctrine of the consent of the governed. The Republican party answered it when it took possession of the force of government at the beginning of the most bril- 22G

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