The court might, with just as much reason, have said that, to preserve the life of the government, congress had the right to sell indulgences for all manner of crimes; for theft, robbery, rape, murder, and all other crimes, for which indulgences would bring a price in the market. Can any one imagine it possible that, if the government had always done nothing but that "equal and exact justice to all men"--which you say it is pledged to do,--but which you must know it has never done,--it could ever have been brought into any such peril of its life, as these judges describe? Could it ever have been necessitated to take either "the poor man's cattle, and horses, and corn," or "the rich man's bonds and notes," or poor men's "bodies and lives," without their consent? Could it ever have been necessitated to "conscript" the poor man--too poor to pay a ransom of three hundred dollars--made thus poor by the tyranny of the government itself--"deprive him of his liberty, and destroy his life"? Could it ever have been necessitated to sell indulgences for crime to either debtors, or creditors, or anybody else? To preserve "the constitution"--a constitution, I repeat, that authorized nothing but "equal and exact justice to all men"--could it ever have been necessitated to send into the field millions of ignorant young men, to cut the throats of other young men as ignorant as themselves--few of whom, on either side, had ever read the constitution, or had any real knowledge of its legal meaning; and not one of whom had ever signed it, or promised to support it, or was under the least obligation to support it? It is, I think, perfectly safe to say, that not one in a thousand, probably not one in ten thousand, of these young men, who were sent out to butcher others, and be butchered themselves, had any real knowledge of the constitution they were professedly sent out to support; or any reasonable knowledge of the real character and motives of the congresses and courts that profess to administer the constitution. If they had possessed this knowledge, how many of them would have ever gone to the field? But further. Is it really true that the right of the government to commit all these atrocities: _Are the fundamental political conditions on which life, property, and money are respectively held and enjoyed under our system of government?_