Most non-Catholics will deny that the American state is founded on the recognition of the independence and superiority of the spiritual order, and therefore, of the church, and the confession of its own subordination to the spiritual, not only in the order of logic, as Il Signor Cantù maintains, but also in the order of authority; yet a little reflection ought to satisfy every one that such is the fact, and if it does not, it will be owing to a misconception of what is spiritual. The basis of the American state or constitution, the real, unwritten, providential constitution, we mean, is what are called the natural and inalienable rights of man; and we know no American citizen who does not hold that these rights are prior to civil society, above it, and held independently of it; or that does not maintain that the great end for which civil society is instituted is to protect, defend, and vindicate, if need be, with its whole physical force, these sacred and inviolable rights for each and every citizen, however high, however low. This is our American boast, our American conception of political justice, glory. These rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are the higher, the supreme law for civil society, which the state, however constituted, is bound to recognize and obey. They deny the absolutism of the state, define its sphere, restrict its power, and prescribe its duty. But whence come these rights? and how can they bind the state, and prescribe its duty? We hold these rights by virtue, of our manhood, it is said; they are inherent in it, and constitute it. But my rights bind you, and yours bind me, and yet you and I are equal; our manhoods are equal. How, then, can the manhood of either bind or morally oblige the other? Of things equal one cannot be superior to another. They are in our nature as men, it is said again, or, simply, we hold them from nature. They are said to be natural rights and inalienable, and what is natural must be in or from nature. Nature is taken in two senses; as the physical order or the physical laws constitutive of the physical universe, and as the moral law under which all creatures endowed with reason and free-will are placed by the Creator, and which is cognizable by natural reason or the reason common to all men. In the first sense, these rights are not inherent in our nature as men, nor from nature, or in nature; for they are not physical. Physical rights are a contradiction in terms. They can be inherent in our nature only in the second sense, and in our moral nature only, and consequently are held under the law which founds and sustains moral nature, or the moral order as distinct from the physical order.