duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform.  Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but, consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burdensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort.  Children are not consenting to their relation; but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties,—­or rather it implies their consent, because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things.  Men come in that manner into a community with the social state of their parents, endowed with all the benefits, loaded with all the duties of their situation.  If the social ties and ligaments, spun out of those physical relations which are the elements of the commonwealth, in most cases begin, and always continue, independently of our will, so, without any stipulation on our own part, are we bound by that relation called our country, which comprehends (as it has been well said) “all the charities of all."[21] Nor are we left without powerful instincts to make this duty as dear and grateful to us as it is awful and coercive.  Our country is not a thing of mere physical locality.  It consists, in a great measure, in the ancient order into which we are born.  We may have the same geographical situation, but another country; as we may have the same country in another soil.  The place that determines our duty to our country is a social, civil relation.

These are the opinions of the author whose cause I defend.  I lay them down, not to enforce them upon others by disputation, but as an account of his proceedings.  On them he acts; and from them he is convinced that neither he, nor any man, or number of men, have a right (except what necessity, which is out of and above all rule, rather imposes than bestows) to free themselves from that primary engagement into which every man born into a community as much contracts by his being born into it as he contracts an obligation to certain parents by his having been derived from their bodies.  The place of every man determines his duty.  If you ask, Quem te Deus esse jussit? you will be answered when you resolve this other question, Humana qua parte locatus es in re?[22]

I admit, indeed, that in morals, as in all things else, difficulties will sometimes occur.  Duties will sometimes cross one another.  Then questions will arise, which of them is to be placed in subordination? which of them may be entirely superseded?  These doubts give rise to that part of moral science called casuistry, which though necessary to be well studied by those who would become expert in that learning, who aim at becoming what I think Cicero somewhere calls artifices officiorum, it requires a very solid and discriminating judgment, great modesty and caution, and much sobriety of mind in the handling; else there is a danger that it may totally subvert