Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people, and it is a moral reproach to us that they should have pleaded it so long in vain.
We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state.
The truth is that the want of common education with us is not from our poverty, but from the want of an orderly system. More money is now paid for the education of a part than would be paid for that of the whole if systematically arranged.
All the States but our own are sensible that knowlege is power.
People generally have more feeling for canals and roads than education. However, I hope we can advance them with equal pace.
There are two subjects, indeed, which I shall claim a right to further as long as I breathe: the public education, and the sub-division of counties into wards. I consider the continuance of republican government as absolutely hanging on these two hooks.
Certainly, no power to prescribe any religious exercise, or to assume authority in religious discipline, has been delegated to the General Government.
Civil officials have no business meddling in private religious affairs.
No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.
Every one must act according to the dictates of his own reason, and mine tells me that civil powers alone have been given to the President of the United States, and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents.
What is it men cannot be made to believe!
I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.
I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did.
But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State.
The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.
A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings.
Private enterprise manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal.
The art of printing secures us against the retrogradation of reason and information.