Government being not only that which governs, but that which has the right to govern, obedience to it becomes a moral duty, not a mere physical necessity.The right to govern and the duty to obey are correlatives, and the one cannot exist or be conceived without the other.Hence loyalty is not simply an amiable sentiment but a duty, a moral virtue.Treason is not merely a difference in political opinion with the governing authority, but a crime against the sovereign, and a moral wrong, therefore a sin against God, the Founder of the moral Law.Treason, if committed in other Countries, unhappily, has been more frequently termed by our countrymen Patriotism and loaded with honor than branded as a crime, the greatest of crimes, as it is, that human governments have authority to punish.The American people have been chary of the word loyalty, perhaps because they regard it as the correlative of royalty; but loyalty is rather the correlative of law, and is, in its essence, love and devotion to the sovereign authority, however constituted or wherever lodged.It is as necessary, as much a duty, as much a virtue in republics as in monarchies; and nobler examples of the most devoted loyalty are not found in the world's history than were exhibited in the ancient Greek and Roman republics, or than have been exhibited by both men and women in the young republic of the United States.
Loyalty is the highest, noblest, and most generous of human virtues, and is the human element of that sublime love or charity which the inspired Apostle tells us is the fulfilment of the law.
It has in it the principle of devotion, of self-sacrifice, and is, of all human virtues, that which renders man the most Godlike.There is nothing great, generous, good, or heroic of which a truly loyal people are not capable, and nothing mean, base, cruel, brutal, criminal, detestable, not to be expected of a really disloyal people.Such a people no generous sentiment can move, no love can bind.It mocks at duty, scorns virtue, tramples on all rights, and holds no person, no thing, human or divine, sacred or inviolable.The assertion of government as lying in the moral order, defines civil liberty, and reconciles it with authority.Civil liberty is freedom to do whatever one pleases that authority permits or does not forbid.Freedom to follow in all things one's own will or inclination, without any civil restraint, is license, not liberty.There is no lesion to liberty in repressing license, nor in requiring obedience to the commands of the authority that has the right to command.Tyranny or oppression is not in being subjected to authority, but in being subjected to usurped authority--to a power that has no right to command, or that commands what exceeds its right or its authority.To say that it is contrary to liberty to be forced to forego our own will or inclination in any case whatever, is simply denying the right of all government, and falling into no-governmentism.Liberty is violated only when we are required to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no right to make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as far as authority has right to govern, and we can never have the right to disobey a rightful command.The requisition, if made by rightful authority, then, violates no right that we have or can have, and where there is no violation of our rights there is no violation of our liberty.The moral right of authority, which involves the moral duty of obedience, presents, then, the ground on which liberty and authority may meet in peace and operate to the same end.
This has no resemblance to the slavish doctrine of passive obedience, and that the resistance to power can never be lawful.
The tyrant may be lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by force of the word itself, is a usurper, and without authority.Abuses of power may be resisted even by force when they become too great to be endured, when there is no legal or regular way of redressing them, and when there is a reasonable prospect that resistance will prove effectual and substitute something better in their place.But it is never lawful to resist the rightful sovereign, for it can never be right to resist right, and the rightful sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never be said to abuse it.Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful exercise of a power rightfully held, and when it is not so exercised there is no abuse or abuses to redress.All turns, then, on the right of power, or its legitimacy.Whence does government derive its right to govern? What is the origin and ground of sovereignty? This question is fundamental and without a true answer to it politics cannot be a science, and there can be no scientific statesmanship.Whence, then, comes the sovereign right to govern?
