Tyrannicide, Part Three

"He therefore who would authorize the destruction of tyrants does not authorize the destruction of kings, but of the most inveterate enemies to kings."
John Milton
Second Defense of the English People
1654

Tyrannicide, Part Two

"Let them show us then why the same law may not justify much more a state or whole people, to do justice upon him against whom each private man may lawfully defend himself; seeing all kind of justice done is a defense to all good men, as well as a punishment to bad, and justice done upon a tyrant is no more but the necessary self-defense of a whole commonwealth. To war upon a king that his instruments may be brought to condign punishment, and thereafter to punish them the instruments, and not to spare only, but to defend and honor him the author, is the strangest piece of justice to be called Christian, and the strangest piece of reason to be called human, that by men of reverence and learning, as their style imports them, ever yet was vented. They maintain in the third and fourth section that a judge or inferior magistrate is anointed of God, is his minister, hath the sword in his hand, is to be obeyed by St. Peter's rule, as well as the supreme, and without difference anywhere expressed: and yet will have us fight against the supreme till he remove and punish the inferior magistrate (for such were greatest delinquents); whenas by scripture and reason there can be no more authority be shown to resist the one than the other; and altogether as much to punish or depose the supreme himself as to make war upon him till he punish or deliver up his inferior magistrates, whom in the same terms we are commanded to obey and not to resist."
Christopher Goodman
Of Obedience

Tyrannicide

"Whence doubtless our ancestors, who were not ignorant with what rights either nature or ancient constitution had endowed them, when oaths both at coronation and renewed in parliament would not serve, thought it no way illegal to depose and put to death their tyrannous kings. Insomuch that the parliament drew up a charge against Richard the Second, and the commons requested to have judgment decreed against him that the realm might not be endangered."
John Milton
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
1649

Commonality

"Nor is it distance of place that makes enmity, but enmity that makes distance. He, therefore, that keeps peace with me, near or remote, of whatsoever nation, is to me, as far as all civil and human offices, and Englishman and a neighbor. But if an Englishman, forgetting all laws, human, civil, and religious, offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the law in his behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better than a Turk, a Saracen, a heathen."
John Milton
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
1649

Selfish Ruler a Tyrant

"A tyrant, whether by wrong or by right coming to the crown, is he who, regarding neither law nor the common good, reigns only for himself and his faction: thus St. Basil among others, defines him.
John Milton
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
1649

Election of Kings

"This, though it cannot but stand with plain reason, shall be made good also by Scripture (Deut. XVII,14):'When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations about me.' These words confirm us that the right of choosing, yea of changing their own government, is by the grant of God himself in the people. And therefore when they desire a king, though then under another form of government and though their changing displeased him, yet he that was himself their king and rejected by them would not be a hindrance to what they intended further than by persuasion, but that they might do therein as they saw good (I Sam. VII),only he reserved to himself the nomination of who should reign over them."
John Milton
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
1649

Origins of Authority

"It being thus manifest that the power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what only is derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of them all, in whom the power remains fundamentally and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their natural birthright, and seeing that from hence Aristotle, and the best of political writers, have defined a king, him who governs to the good and profit of his people, and not for his own ends--it follows from necessary causesthat the titles of sovereign lord, natural lord, and the like, are either arrogancies or flatteries, not admitted by emperors and kings of best note, and disliked by the church both of Jews (Isaiah 26,13) and ancient Christians, as appears by Tertullian and others. Although generally the people of Asia, and with them the Jews also, especially since the time they chose a king against the advice and counsel of God, are noted by wise authors much inclinable to slavery."
John Milton
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
1649

Nature of Contract

"No man who knows aught, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were, by privilege above all the creatures, born to command, and not to obey; and that they lived so, till from the root of Adam's transgression falling among themselves to do wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury, and jointly to defend themselves against any that gave disturbance or opposition to such agreement. Hence came cities, towns, and commonwealths. And because no faith in all was found sufficiently binding, they saw it needful to ordain some authority that might restrain by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common right."

John Milton
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
1649

Virtue In Government

"For, indeed, none can love freedom heartily but good men; the rest love not freedom but license, which never have more scope or more indulgence than under tyrants."
John Milton
Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
1649

Laws Lean on One Another, Part Three

"If any one shall imagine that I have forgotten my own notion of a law, when I make the law, whereby men judge of virtue and vice, to be nothing else but the consent of private men, who have not authority enough to make a law: especially wanting that which is so necessary and essential to a law, a power to enforce it: I think I may say, that he who imagines commendation and disgrace not to be strong motives to men to accomodate themselves to the opinions and rules of those with whom they converse, seems little skilled in the nature or history of mankind: the greatest part whereof we shall find to govern themselves chiefly, if not solely, by this law of fashion; and so they do that which keeps them in reputation with their company, little regard the laws of God, or the magistrate." John Locke Concerning Human Understanding, p231.

Congressional Reform, Part Five

"If we degrade and deprave their minds by servility, it will be absurd to expect, that they who are creeping and abject towards us, will ever be bold and incorruptible assertors of our freedom, against the most seducing and the most formidible of all powers. (p216)"

". . . if we do not permit our members to act upon a very enlarged view of things; we shall at length infallibly degrade our national representation into a confused and scuffling bustle of local agency."

Edmund Burke
Guildhall Speech

Congressional Reform, Part Four

"Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
Edmund Burke
Speech to the Electors of Bristol p 54-55.

Congressional Reform, Part Three

"In legal construction, the sense of the people of England is to be collected from the House of Commons; and, though I do not deny the possibility of an abuse of this trust as well as any other, yet I think, without the most weighty reasons, and in the most urgent exigencies, it is highly dangerous to suppose that the House speaks any thing contrary to the sense of the people, or that the representative is silent when the sense of the constituent strongly, decidedly, and upon long deliberation, speaks audibly upon any topic of moment. If there is a doubt whether the House of Commons represents perfectly the whole Commons of Great Britain, (I think there is none) there can be no question but that Lords and the Commons represent the sense of the whole people to the Crown, and to the world. Thus it is, when we speak legally and constitutionally. In a great measure, it is equally true, when we speak prudentially, but I do not pretend to assert, that there are no other principles to guide discretion than those which are or can be fixed by some law, or some constitution; yet before the legally presumed sense of the people should be superseded by a supposition of one more real (as in all cases, where a legal presumption is to be ascertained) some strong proofs ought to exist of a contrary disposition in the people at large, and some decisive indications of their desire upon this subject."
Edmund Burke
Letters on a Regicide Peace p236-37.

Congressional Reform, Part Two

"'Tis not therefore for Kent or Sussex, Lewis or Maidstone, but for the whole nation, that the members chosen in these places are sent to serve in Parliament: and tho it be fit for them as friends and neighbors (so far as may be) to hearken to the opinions of the electors for the information of their judgments, and to the end that what they shall say may be of more weight, when everyone is known not to speak his own thoughts only, but those of a great number of men; yet they are not strictly and properly obliged to give account of their actions to any, unless the whole body of the nation for they serve, and who are equally concerned in their resolutions could be assembled."
Algernon Sidney
Discourses on Government, p 565.

Lex Misericordia

"Sir, there is no human enactment which is just that is not a re-enactment of the law of God."
William Henry Seward
Higher Law Speech

Laws Lean on One Another, Part Two

"Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex and sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them."

Edmund Burke
Letters on a Regicide Peace, p 126.

Obama Now Selling Judgeships for Health Care Votes?

Obama Now Selling Judgeships for Health Care Votes?

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The Strange Death of Humor, Part Two

This is directed to those of you who write what passes for comedy in 2010. Down's Syndrome is not a hoot. Have you traded in your humanity? What is wrong with you? Do other people's problems make you feel like laughing? Oh, it's your politics. So it is all right to make fun of diseases, so long as it advances your political position. It's vivisection morality again. THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION, WHILE THE WORST ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.

Things Reversed

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The Falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION, WHILE THE WORST
ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

W.B. Yeats
"The Second Coming"

Laws Lean On One Another

"[S]uch traditions should neither be designated laws nor left unformulated. They are the mortises of a constitution, the connecting links between all the enactments already reduced to writing, and preserved by it, and those yet to be recorded, a true corpus of ancestral and primitive tradition which, rightly instituted and duly followed in practice, will serve as a sure shield for all the statutes hitherto committed to writing, while if they swerve from the right bounds, it is as when a builder's supports give and subside under his edifice; the result is a general collapse of one part upon another, substructure and all that has been so admirably built upon it alike, when once the original supports have fallen."
Plato
Laws, Book Seven, p 176
(A.E. Taylor trans.)