Who among you, my countrymen, that is a father, would claim authority to make your child a slave because you had nourished him in infancy?

’Tis a strange species of generosity which requires a return infinitely more valuable than anything it could have bestowed that demands as a reward for a defense of our property a surrender of those inestimable privileges, to the arbitrary will of vindictive tyrants, which alone give value to that very property.

Political right and public happiness are different words for the same idea.  They who wander into metaphysical labyrinths, or have recourse to original contracts, to determine the rights of men, either impose on themselves or mean to delude others.  Public utility is the only certain criterion.  It is a test which brings disputes to a speedy decision, and makes its appeal to the feelings of mankind.  The force of truth has obliged men to use arguments drawn from this principle who were combating it, in practice and speculation.  The advocates for a despotic government and nonresistance to the magistrate employ reasons in favor of their systems drawn from a consideration of their tendency to promote public happiness.

The Author of Nature directs all his operations to the production of the greatest good, and has made human virtue to consist in a disposition and conduct which tends to the common felicity of his creatures.  An abridgement of the natural freedom of men, by the institutions of political societies, is vindicable only on this foot.  How absurd, then, is it to draw arguments from the nature of civil society for the annihilation of those very ends which society was intended to procure!  Men associate for their mutual advantage.  Hence, the good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members, of any State, is the great standard by which everything relating to that State must finally be determined; and though it may be supposed that a body of people may be bound by a voluntary resignation (which they have been so infatuated as to make) of all their interests to a single person, or to a few, it can never be conceived that the resignation is obligatory to their posterity; because it is manifestly contrary to the good of the whole that it should be so.

These are the sentiments of the wisest and most virtuous champions of freedom.  Attend to a portion on this subject from a book in our own defense, written, I had almost said, by the pen of inspiration.  “I lay no stress,” says he, “on charters; they derive their rights from a higher source.  It is inconsistent with common sense to imagine that any people would ever think of settling in a distant country on any such condition, or that the people from whom they withdrew should forever be masters of their property, and have power to subject them to any modes of government they pleased.  And had there been expressed stipulations to this purpose in all the charters of the colonies, they would, in my opinion, be no more bound by them, than if it had been stipulated with them that they should go naked, or expose themselves to the incursions of wolves and tigers.”