to be bound.  The exercise of such a power, if it is to exist, cannot be limited to the particular cases which you or I or any man now living may have in mind.  It must be general.  If it can be exercised at all it can and will be exercised by the majority whenever they wish to exercise it.  If it can be employed to make a Workmen’s Compensation Act in such terms as to violate the constitution, it can be employed to prohibit the worship of an unpopular religious sect, or to take away the property of an unpopular rich man without compensation, or to prohibit freedom of speech and of the press in opposition to prevailing opinion, or to deprive one accused of crime of a fair trial when he has been condemned already by the newspapers.  In every case the question whether the majority shall be bound by those general principles of action which the people have prescribed for themselves will be determined in that case by the will of the majority, and therefore in no case will the majority be bound except by its own will at the time.

The exercise of such a power would strike at the very foundation of our system of government.  It would be a reversion to the system of the ancient republics where the state was everything and the individual nothing except as a part of the state, and where liberty perished.  It would be a repudiation of the fundamental principle of Anglo-Saxon liberty which we inherit and maintain, for it is the very soul of our political institutions that they protect the individual against the majority.  “All men,” says the Declaration, “are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.  Governments are instituted to secure these rights.”  The rights are not derived from any majority.  They are not disposable by any majority.  They are superior to all majorities.  The weakest minority, the most despised sect, exist by their own right.  The most friendless and lonely human being on American soil holds his right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and all that goes to make them up by title indefeasible against the world, and it is the glory of American self-government that by the limitations of the constitution we have protected that right against even ourselves.  That protection cannot be continued and that right cannot be maintained, except by jealously preserving at all times and under all circumstances the rule of principle which is eternal over the will of majorities which shift and pass away.

Democratic absolutism is just as repulsive, and history has shown it to be just as fatal, to the rights of individual manhood as is monarchical absolutism.