He can learn it as well, if he will, without its
being enacted, as he could if it were.
If our governments would but themselves adhere to natural law,
there would be little occasion to complain of the ignorance of the
people in regard to it. The popular ignorance of law is
attributable mainly to the innovations that have been made upon
natural law by legislation; whereby our system has become an
incongruous mixture of natural and statute law, with no uniform
principle pervading it. To learn such a system, if system it can
be called, and if learned it can be, is a matter of very similar
difficulty to what it would be to learn a system of mathematics,
which should consist of the mathematics of nature, interspersed
with such other mathematics as might be created by legislation, in
violation of all the natural principles of numbers and quantities.
But whether the difficulties of learning natural law be greater or
less than here represented, they exist in the nature of things,
and cannot be removed.
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