Product Description
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: It will probably appear from this examination of the written constitutions, that slavery neither has, nor ever had any constitutional existence in this country; that it has always been a mere abuse, sustained, in the first instance, merely by the common consent of the strongest party, without any law on the subject, and, in the second place, by a few unconstitutional enactments, made in defiance of the plainest provisions of their fundamental law. For the more convenient consideration of this point, we will divide the constitutional history of the country into three periods; the first embracing the time from the first settlement of the country up to the Declaration of Independence; the second embracing the time from the Declaration of Independence to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States in 1789; and the third embracing all the time since the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. Let us now consider the first period; that is, from the settlement of the country, to the Declaration of Independence. members of the association, he thereby acquires a claim upon the: association to have his own rights protected without diminution. The ultimate truth on this subject is, that man has an inalienable right to so much personal liberty as he will use without invading the rights of others. This liberty is an inherent right of his nature and his faculties. It is an inherent right of his nature and his faculties to develope themselves freely, and without restraint from other natures and faculties, that have no superior prerogatives to his own. And this right has only this limit, viz., that he do not carry the exercise of his own liberty so far as to restrain or infringe the equally free development of the natures and faculties of others. The dividing line...
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Lysander Spooner (18081887) was an American liberal political philosopher, abolitionist, and legal theorist of the Nineteenth Century. He was born in Massachusetts. Spooner is best remembered for his efforts to end slavery and for his competition with the U.S. Post Office. As an individualist and anarchist, Spooner advocated for natural-rights or natural-law theory. His famous work is The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1846). His other writings include An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852).
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
