Book Description

From the introductory note... Ethics. Philosophical and Political. "Coercive and arbitrary measures can never make A man moral, or inspire him with incentives to do rights. Man's nominal condition is freedom...It is an impertinence to thrust one man's belief upon another for his direction. The passion to exercise dominion over another is diabolical. There is no goodness where liberty is interfered with." - Prof, Alexander Wilder. "Nothing is -more sacred than human natural rights. No crime is more heinous than their violation. The Declaration of Independence asserted them. Revolutionary heroes suffered and died to protect them from invasion. The Constitution was ordained and established to secure them. Faithless, recreant, to their oaths and their trusts, are public men who subordinate the prime objects of the Constitution to their personal or denominational religious preferences. Thereby they pervert justice, retard the general welfare, and abridge the blessings of liberty to the people of the United States and their posterity." - A. E Giles. "Wherever the flag floats, wherever an American is found within the jurisdiction of the Republic, are those fundamental principles of liberty which are the inheritance of the race, and which, for greater safety, were enumerated in the Federal Constitution, as they are in the State Constitutions. They existed long before these Written declarations of the public will, and will doubtless long survive them, Our ancestors did not claim, representation in the British Parliament; but they did claim That they carried with them, into every settlement, however distant or humble, the rights of Englishmen, and to those they made good their title. It is clear that, in like manner, every American, wherever he may go within the limits of his free country, carries with him the safeguards of American liberty. Congress cannot erect a mere despotism in Utah any more than it can erect one in New York. The property, the liberty, the family relations of citizens, cannot lawfully be placed at the mercy of a board of five men deriving their power from a another man, in one place or the other." - New York Sun, March 29, 1882.