“Unlimited power belongs not to the nature of man, and rotten will be the foundation of every government leaning upon such a maxim for its support.… The pretence of an absolute, irresistible, despotic power existing in every government _somewhere_ is incompatible with the first principle of natural right.… The _sovereignty_ which would arrogate to itself absolute, unlimited power must appeal for its sanction to those illustrious expounders of Human Rights, Pharaoh of Egypt and Herod the Great of Judea.”[29] In another passage of the same oration, the patriot statesman says, in words which answer a portion of Mr. Thayer’s arguments:-- “It has sometimes been objected to the Declaration, that it deals too much in abstractions. But this was its characteristic excellence; for upon those abstractions hinged the justice of the cause. Without them our Revolution would have been but successful rebellion. Right, truth, justice are all abstractions. The Divinity that stirs within the soul of man is abstraction. The Creator of the universe is a spirit, and all spiritual nature is abstraction. Happy would it be, could we answer with equal confidence another objection, not to the Declaration, but to the consistency of the people by whom it was proclaimed!”[30] These same views were enforced again by Mr. Adams in his oration at Newburyport, July 4, 1837. There he uses words which reveal the limits of Popular Sovereignty. Thus he speaks:-- “The sovereign authority conferred upon the people of the Colonies by the Declaration of Independence could not dispense them, nor any individual citizen of them, from the fulfilment of all their moral obligations.… The people who assumed their equal and separate station among the powers of the earth, by the laws of Nature’s God, by that very act acknowledged themselves bound to the observance of those laws, _and could neither exercise nor confer any power inconsistent with them_.”[31] Then alluding to the self-imposed restraints upon the sovereignty which was established, our teacher says:--