Among the great many opinions expressed regarding usurpation of the
government or despotism, one attracted my attention and agreed so much
with my own sentiment that I could not but pay due merit to the moral
truth of it. Despotism is despicable in its perpetrator and at all
times a disgrace to human beings, depriving them perforce of their
inalienable rights and their moral esteem for themselves and bringing
them down on common ground with slaves. Although as just mentioned,
despotism is at all times disgraceful to both sides we ought to pity
those beings more who got their power as an inheritance than hate
them. Who would and can deny that the early trainings of men lay the
foundations to their further field of action? Therefore, when princes
become the heirs of absolute governments, who can expect them to act
differently than the Southern man does to his slaves? The latter,
who was brought up among the family of mankind, and has accepted
principles common to them, is much more to blame for his tyranny than
a sovereign who was raised alone isolated from his fellowmen by a
belief in his divine origin and who never imagined, therefore, nor
ever dreamed of the least equality with mankind. If Napoleon was great
as conqueror, he was equally despicable for the misuse he made of the
confidence entrusted in him by the people, and instead of perfecting
the rights and liberties of the nation, he cheated them of these very
objects given to his care and usurped the government. Napoleon knew
how to play the deceiver well enough to keep the people in their happy
dreams. He knew how to flatter them by giving them all visible power,
but he showed by his future way of action that he only played the
hypocrite and that his outward course only served him to attain his
inward higher object which was nothing short of grasping the nation and
enslaving his own countrymen, as all other nations, which were possible
for him, he conquered. Looking back from the point we started and
considering once more both hereditary despots and usurpated despots,
so will we certainly not think so hard of one who has got that power
by inheritance, or who was raised from infancy to this sole object of
keeping the people down, in poverty, and slavery, as of a usurpator,
who has imbibed principles of liberty and equality, sympathises with
his brothers, and becomes then their flatterer, and by abuse of
his mental faculties and moral sentiments, with a happy change of
circumstances, their master and commander.
It is the great political question at present, if America is bound
by the treaties with the foreign sovereigns to abstain from helping
the poor, downtrodden and oppressed people of those countries to
their attainments of their inalienable rights. It is true that at
the time when our constitution was made, our forefathers or rather
their representatives in Congress, made a contract with the European
princes to observe neutrality in their affairs, and declared therefore
it to be the duty of this government for its own dignity as well as
for the honor of the nation not to send any help to Europe, but to be
free from doing such an illegal act. America being, however, the most
liberal, and by that the most powerful government in the world, if
it is her duty to stick to the act which our forefathers have made,
there is still the other side of the argument to consider, to arrive
to a proper result. Justice is the first law of nature and as all
of us expect to get justice done from our neighbors, and especially
the government we have chosen out of our minds, so humanity demands
to see our brothers, however distant, equalized in the same way. The
consistent law or the laws on which societies are framed, and reared
up to developed bodies, are of various kinds, devised principally by
our philanthropists and philosophers and legislators, for the best of
the parties concerned. Their origin, however, being of human intellect
and moral sentiment, can be only as following out very narrow sources,
limited in their consistency with human happiness. Laws which are the
most beneficial influence upon a society under certain circumstances
and times, may be quite the opposite, with another united body, under
different physical and moral conditions. Times and circumstances,
therefore, cannot be suited to laws, but the latter need to be in a
harmonizing cooperation with the former. If, therefore, our forefathers
made laws or what is the same, the Constitution, they could not at
that time, establish or devise such as should stand for all times
but only for themselves and for their own generation. If Washington,
John Adams or Jefferson, made treaties with foreign despots, it was
for various causes arising out of their own at that time yet feebly
maintained independence. But times have changed, out of that spark of
freedom which fell among the population of this continent has come a
powerful government, illuminating, with its might, the whole world,
and whose physical powers are sufficient to crush all enemies to dust
and raise downtrodden, oppressed and dishumanized mankind and brothers
up to their by nature determined position of equality and fraternity.
As maintained before, the exhausted position of America, which only
could follow so great and sacrificing a struggle as that of the war
of independence, obliged our forefathers to make friendly treaties
with the foreign powers, to avoid if possible another blow upon their
rights and liberties maintained so gloriously with England. But what
is our strength at this moment? Are we still so feeble? Still so
dependent on beings who are the scourge of mankind and deface the earth
with cruelty and tyranny? We all certainly will say no. All will say
America is no more dependent on anybody but themselves and nature's
laws. Politics and love to live forced legislators to treat friendly
with despots and now this voice of justice and humanity calls them to
throw off this so long maintained mask of amity to tyrannical systems
and to declare themselves at once for mankind and fellowmen. The
voice of nature is mighty and omnipotent. She calls us up out of our
dreamlike indifference to honorable participation in the fate of our
fellowmen and makes it our duty to stand in defense of her laws on this
planet and home of intellectual creatures. Let us throw off then our
fastidious way of action and exert one and all of us the strength both
physical and moral, for universal happiness and so lay by this the road
to world's perfection.