Show peoples campaign circular no 1 HUMAN RIGHTS I 1 religious liberty to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against pe peace ce and good order jefferson in these two sentences is found the true distinction between what properly belongs to the church and what to the state united states supreme court in the reynolds Key case the rights of conscience we never submitted we could not submit we are answerable for them to our god the legitimate powers of government extend to such actions only as are injurious to others constraint may make him worse by making him a hypocrite but will never make him a truer man it may fix him obstinately in his errors but will not cure them reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error jeffersons notes on virginia fi those that are seditious murderers thieves robbers adulterers of whatsoever church ought to be punished and suppressed but those whose doctrine is peaceable and whose manners are pure and blameless ought to be upon equal terms with their fellow subjects john A lockes lockers works prosecution and persecution if such arguments are to pass current it wip ile be easy to prove that there was never such a thing as religious persecution since the creation were there never was a religious persecution in which some odious crime crime was not justly or unjustly said to be obviously 0 asly de deducible cible from the doctrines of the persecuted party parly we might say that the caesars caesara did not persecute the christians that they only punished men who were charged rightly or wrongly with burning rome and with committing the foulest abominations in secret assemblies and that the refusal to throw fra ensie pt the altar of jupiter 4 vt the crime crime but only evidence of abe crime we might say that the massacre of st bartholomew was intended to extirpate not a religious sect but a political party for beyond all doubt the proceedings of the huguenots Huguen from the conspiracy of amboise to the battle of moncontour Mon contour had given much more trouble to the french monarchy than the catholics have ever given to the english monarchy since the reformation and that too with much less excuse the true distinction is perfectly obvious to punish a man because he has committed a crime or because he is believed though unjustly to have committed a crime is not perse cution to ronisha man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds or from the conduct of other joer persons sons who hold the same doctrines with him that he will commit a crime is persecution and is in very every case foolish and wicked but to argue that because a man is a catholic he must think it right to murder a heretical severo 0 and that because he thinks it ight he will attempt to do it and then to found on this conclusion a law aw for punishing uni shing him as if he had done icv it Is plain persecution man in short is so inco inconsistent insistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his belief to his conduct or from cne part of his belief to another let it pass however that every catholic in the kingdom thought that elizabeth might be lawfully murdered still the old maxim that what is the business of everybody is the business of nobody is particularly likely to hold go d in a case in which a cruel death is the almost inevitable consequence of making any attempt of the ten thousand clergymen of the church of england there is scarcely one who would not say that a man who should leave his country and friends to preach the gospel among savages and who should after laboring indefatigably without any hope of reward terminate his life by martyrdom would deserve the warmest admiration yet we doubt whet herten of the ten thousand ever thought of going on such an expedition why should we suppose that conscientious motives feeble as they are constantly found to be in a good cause should be omnipotent for evil Macau lays essay on hallam the constitution it is said is essentially senti ally christian and therefore to admit jews to office is to destroy the constitute n nor is the jew injured by being excluded from political power for no man has an any right to power A man has a right to his property a man danl has aright ak rig h t to be protected froth freih thesle these rights the law allows to the jew and with these rights right it would be atrocious to interfere but it is mere matter of favor to admit any man to political power and no man can justly complain that he is shut out from it we cannot but admire the ingene ity of this contrivance for shifting the burden of the proof from those to whom it properly belongs and who would we suspect find it rather cumbersome ber some surely no christian can deny that every human human being has a right to be allowed every gratification wh which ch produces no harm to others and to be spared every mortification which produces no good to others Is it not a source of mortification to a elass class of men that they are excluded from political power if it be they haven have on christian principles a right to be freed from the mortification unless it can be shown that their exclusion is necessary for the averting of some greater evil the presume tion is evidently in favor of toleration it is for the prosecutor to make out his bis case the strange argument which we are considering would prove too much even for those who advance it if no man has a right to political power then neither jew nor gentile has such a right the whole foundation of government is taken away but if government be taken away the property and the persons of men are insecure and it is acknowledged that men have a right to their property and to personal security if it be right that the property of men should be protected and if this can only be done by means of government then it must be right that government should exist now there cannot be government unless some person or persons possess p political political oli power therefore it is right that some person or persons should possess political power that is to say some person or persons must have a right to political power if it is because men are not in the habit of considering what the end of government is that catholic disabilities and jewish disabilities have been suffered to exist so long we hta oi essentially protestant governments and essentially christian governments words which which mean just as much as essentially protestant Pro cookery or essentially christian horse manship government exists for the purpose of keeping the peace for the purpose of compelling us to settle our disputes by arbitration instead of settling them by blows for the purpose of compelling us to supply our wants want by industry instead of 0 supplying them by rapine this is the only operation for which tile the machinery of government is peculiarly adapted the only operation which wise wise governments ever propose to themselves as their chief object if there is any class of people who are not inter ested or who do not think themselves interested in the security of property and the he maintenance of order that class ought to have no share of the powers which exist for the purpose of securing curing ge property and maintaining order nothing is so offensive to a man who knows anything of history or of human nat nature U rp as tho those se who exercise the powers of 01 government accuse any sect of foreign attachments it if there be any proposition universally true in politics it is this that foreign attachments are the fruit of domestic misrule athas always been the trick of bigots to make their subjects miserable at home andain to complain that they look for relief abroad to divide boci society ety and to wonder that it is not united to govern as if a section of the state were the whole and to censure the other sections of the state lor for their want of patriotic spirit if the jews have not felt towards england like children it is because she has treated them like a stepmother there is no feeling whittemore temore more certainly develop itself in the minds of men living under tolerably good government than the feeling of patriotism since the beginning ot of the world there never was any nation or any large portion of any nation not cruelly oppressed which was wholly destitute of that feeling to make it therefore ground of accusation against a class of men that they are not patriotic is the most vulgar legerdemain of sophistry it is is the logic which the wolf employs against the lamb it is to accuse the mouth of the stream of poisoning the source rulers must not be suffered thus to absolve themselves of their solemn responsibility it does not lie in their mouths to say that a sect is not patriotic it is their business to make it patriotic history and reasor reasor clearly indicate the means the english jews are as far as we can see precisely what our government has made them they are precisely what any sect what any class of men treated as they have been treated would have been if all the red haired people in europe had during centuries been outraged a and nd op K pressed banish banished ed from this place imprisoned in that deprived of their money deprived of their teeth convicted of the most improbable crimes on the feeblest evi evidence defice dragged at horses tails hanged tortured burned alive if when manners became milder they had still been subject to debasing restrictions and exposed to vulgar insults locked up in particular streets in some countries pelted belted and ducked by the rabble in others excluded everywhere fromma gist and honors what would be the patriotism of gentlemen with red hair and if under such circumstances a proposition were made for admitting red haired men to office how striking a speech might an eloquent admirer of our old institutions deliver against so revolutionary a measure these men he might say scarcely consider themselves as englishmen they think a red haired frenchman or a red haired german more closely connected with them than a man with brown hair born in their own parish if a foreign sovereign patronizes red hair they love him better than their own native king they are not englishmen they cannot be englishmen nature has forbidden it experience proves it to be impossible right to political cal power they have none for no man has a right to political power let them enjoy personal security let their property be under under ahr the protection of the law but if they ifor ak tor leave to exercise power over a community of which they are only half members a community t the he of which is 1 essentially I ly dark haired let us answer them in the words of our wise ancestors Z ce rolumus leges angline the doctrine of predestination in the opinion of many people tends to make those who hold it utterly immoral and certainly it would seem that a man who believes his eternal destiny to be already irrevocably fixed is likely to indulge his passions without restraint and to neglect his religious duties if he is an heir of wrath his exertions must be unavailing if he is pre or daine bained to life they must beeper flukus but would it be wise to p punish un every man who holds the hi higher g he r doctrines of Calvan galvanism ism as if he had actually committed all those crines crimes which we know some antinomians to have committed assuredly not the fact notoriously is that there are many calvinists as moral in their conduct as any adv and many Armin ians as loose as an any calvinist it is altogether in impossible possible to reason from the opinions which a man professes to his feelings and his actions and in facino person ks is ever such a fool as to reason thus except when he wants a pretext for persecuting his neighbors A christian is commanded under the strongest sanctions to be just in all his dealings yet to how many of the twenty four millions of professing christians in these islands would any man in ih his senses lend a thousand pounds without security A man who should act for one day on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined before night and no man ever does act on that tion in any of the ordinary concerns of life in borrowing in lending in buying or iq in selling but when any of our fellow creatures are to be oppressed the case is different then we represent those motives which we know to be so feeble for good as omnipotent for evil then we lay to the charge of our victims all the vices and follies to which their doc trines brines however remotely seem to tend we forget that the same weak ness the same laxity the same dis position to prefer the present to the future which make men worse than a good religion make them better than a bad one it was in this way that our ancestors reasoned and that some people in our own time still reason about the catholics A papist believes himself bound to obey the pope the pope has issued a bull deposing queen elizabeth therefore every papist will treat her grace as an usurper therefore every papist is a traitor therefore every papist ought to be hanged drawn and quartered to this logic we owe some of the most hateful laws that ever disgraced our history surely the answer lies on the surface the church of rome may have commanded these man nn n to treat the queen as an usurper but she has commanded them to do many other things which they have never done she enjoins her priests to ob perve serve strict you ar are e always taune taunting tAg the them truly wil their licentiousness she commands all her followers to fast often to be charitable to the poor to take no interest for money to fight no duels to see no plays do they obey these injunctions if it be the fact that very few of them strictly observe her precepts when her precepts are opposed to their passions and interests may not lo 10 loyalty y may nut not humanity may not the love of ease may not the fear of death be sufficient to prevent them from executing those wicked orders which she has issued against the sovereign of england when we know that many of these people do not care enough for their religion to 0 go without beef on a friday for iti it why should we think that they will run the risk of being racked and hanged for it people are now reasoning about the jews as our fathers reasoned about the ts the law which is inscribed on the walls of the synagogues prohibits but if we were to say that a jew mortgagee would not foreclose because god had commanded him not to covet his neighbors house everybody would think us out of our wits yet it passes for an argument to say that a jew will take no interest in the prosperity of the country in which he lives that he will nut not care how bad its laws and policy may be how heavily it may be taxed how often it may be conquered and given up to spoil because god has promised that by some unknown means and at some undetermined time perhaps ten thousand years hence the jews shall migrate to palestine Is not this the most profound ignorance of human nature do we not krow that what is remote and indefinite affects men far less than what is near and certain the argument too applies to christians as strongly as to jews the christian believes as well as the jew that at some future period the present order of things will come to an end nay many christians believe that the messiah will establish a kingdom on earth and reign visibly over all its inhabitants whether this doctrine be orthodox or not we shall not here inquire the number of people who hold it is very much greater than the number of jews residing in england it is preached from the |