The struggle will be no less furious within it. To be convinced of
this, it is hardly necessary to look at what passes in the Chambers in
France and in England; it is enough to know how the question stands.
Is there any need to prove that this odious perversion of law is a
perpetual source of hatred and discord,--that it even tends to social
disorganisation? Look at the United States. There is no country in the
world where the law is kept more within its proper domain--which is, to
secure to every one his liberty and his property. Therefore, there is no
country in the world where social order appears to rest upon a more
solid basis. Nevertheless, even in the United States, there are two
questions, and only two, which from the beginning have endangered
political order. And what are these two questions? That of slavery and
that of tariffs; that is, precisely the only two questions in which,
contrary to the general spirit of this republic, law has taken the
character of a plunderer. Slavery is a violation, sanctioned by law, of
the rights of the person. Protection is a violation perpetrated by the
law upon the rights of property; and certainly it is very remarkable
that, in the midst of so many other debates, this double _legal
scourge_, the sorrowful inheritance of the Old World, should be the only
one which can, and perhaps will, cause the rupture of the Union.
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