Doubtless a law forbidding men to
drink water, on pain of death, might be made so intelligible as to
cut off all discussion as to its meaning; but would the
intelligibleness of such a law be any equivalent for the right to
drink water?
The principle is the same in regard to all unjust laws. Few
persons could reasonably feel compensated for the arbitrary
destruction of their rights, by having the order for their
destruction made known beforehand, in terms so distinct and
unequivocal as to admit of neither mistake nor evasion. Yet this
is all the compensation that such laws offer.
Whether, therefore, written laws correspond with, or differ from,
the natural, they are to be condemned. In the first case, they are
useless repetitions, introducing labor and obscurity. In the
latter case, they are positive violations of men's rights.
There would be substantially the same reason in enacting
mathematics by statute, that there is in enacting natural law.
Whenever the natural law is sufficiently certain to all men's
minds to justify its being enacted, it is sufficiently certain to
need no enactment.
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