I must now say something as to the matter of the “Lecture,” in which I confess there is one doctrine laid down that surprises me:  It is this, ’Quum vero hostis sit lenta citave morte omnia dira nobis minitans quocunque bellantibus negotium est; parum sane interfuerit quo modo eum obruere et interficere satagamus, si ferociam exuere cunctetur.  Ergo veneno quoque uti fas est’, etc., whereas I cannot conceive that the use of poison can, upon any account, come within the lawful means of self-defense.  Force may, without doubt, be justly repelled by force, but not by treachery and fraud; for I do not call the stratagems of war, such as ambuscades, masked batteries, false attacks, etc., frauds or treachery:  They are mutually to be expected and guarded against; but poisoned arrows, poisoned waters, or poison administered to your enemy (which can only be done by treachery), I have always heard, read, and thought, to be unlawful and infamous means of defense, be your danger ever so great:  But ‘si ferociam exuere cunctetur’; must I rather die than poison this enemy?  Yes, certainly, much rather die than do a base or criminal action; nor can I be sure, beforehand, that this enemy may not, in the last moment, ‘ferociam exuere’.  But the public lawyers, now, seem to me rather to warp the law, in order to authorize, than to check, those unlawful proceedings of princes and states; which, by being become common, appear less criminal, though custom can never alter the nature of good and ill.

Pray let no quibbles of lawyers, no refinements of casuists, break into the plain notions of right and wrong, which every man’s right reason and plain common sense suggest to him.  To do as you would be done by, is the plain, sure, and undisputed rule of morality and justice.  Stick to that; and be convinced that whatever breaks into it, in any degree, however speciously it may be turned, and however puzzling it may be to answer it, is, notwithstanding, false in itself, unjust, and criminal.  I do not know a crime in the world, which is not by the casuists among the Jesuits (especially the twenty-four collected, I think, by Escobar) allowed, in some, or many cases, not to be criminal.  The principles first laid down by them are often specious, the reasonings plausible, but the conclusion always a lie:  for it is contrary, to that evident and undeniable rule of justice which I have mentioned above, of not doing to anyone what you would not have him do to you.  But, however, these refined pieces of casuistry and sophistry, being very convenient and welcome to people’s passions and appetites, they gladly accept the indulgence, without desiring to detect the fallacy or the reasoning:  and indeed many, I might say most people, are not able to do it; which makes the publication of such quibblings and refinements the more pernicious.  I am no skillful casuist nor subtle disputant; and yet I would undertake to justify and qualify the profession of a highwayman, step by step, and so plausibly, as