Sir, no court can afford to do an act of wrong. Its business is justice; and when, under any apology, it ceases to do justice, it loses those titles to reverence otherwise so willingly bestowed. There are instances of great magistrates openly declaring disobedience to laws “against common right and reason,” and their names are mentioned with gratitude in the history of jurisprudence. There are other instances of men holding the balance and the sword, whose names are gathered into a volume as “atrocious judges.” If our judges, cruelly interpreting the Constitution in favor of Slavery, do not come into the latter class, they can claim no place among those others who have stood for justice, like the rock on which the sea breaks in idle spray. Vainly do you attempt to frame injustice into a law, or to sanctify it by any judgment of court. From Cicero we learn, that, “if commands of the people, if decrees of princes, if _opinions of judges_ were sufficient to constitute right, then were it right to commit highway robbery, right to commit adultery, right to set up forged wills.”[288] And Augustine tells us, with saintly authority, that what is unjust cannot be law.[289] Every law and every judgment of court, to be binding, must have at its back the everlasting, irrepealable law of God. Doubtless the model decision of the American bench, destined to be quoted hereafter with most honor, because the boldest in its conformity with great principles of humanity and social order, was that of the Vermont judge who refused to surrender a fugitive slave _until his pretended master could show a title-deed from the Almighty_. But courts have no longer occasion for such boldness. They need not step outside the Constitution. It is only needed that they should follow just principles in its interpretation. Let them be guided by a teacher like Edmund Burke, who spoke as follows:-- “_Men cannot covenant themselves out of their rights and their duties_; nor by any other means can arbitrary power be conveyed to any man. _Those who give to others such rights perform acts that are void as they are given.…_ Those who give and those who receive arbitrary power are alike criminal, and there is no man but is bound to resist it to the best of his power, wherever it shall show its face to the world. It is a crime to bear it, when it can be rationally shaken off.”[290] Or let them be guided by that other teacher, Lord Chatham, when he said:--