Political sovereignty--residing, as we have seen it does, in the whole people as the state, or as one body politic--is not an absolute sovereignty. It is limited to the just ends of the state--the maintenance of social justice and the general security and welfare. There is no sovereignty to do wrong. The state is so far a moral person that its sovereignty cannot rightfully be exercised from mere will, arbitrary caprice, or passion; but only dutifully, in just ways, and for its proper ends. But the people whom you teach to consider as themselves individually possessed of a portion of the sovereign power, and (as they will think) so far sovereigns, have mostly no other idea of sovereignty than the absolute right to have their own will and way in any way. Regarding their political rights as their own, inherent, personal possession and property, and not as public trusts, they are not likely to feel themselves limited in the manner of exercising them by any sense of duty to the state. The stronger this false notion of rights, the feebler the sense of moral obligation in the exercise of them. Woe to the people to whom rights are everything and duties nothing, or to whom the standing for their own rights is the highest and most sacred political duty! Among such a people, in times of high excitement, springs up a political fanaticism far less respectable in its origin, and far more dangerous to the public welfare, than the philanthropic fanaticism which you denounce in language so nearly bordering on fanatic violence. I am sorry to have been obliged to insist at such length upon the simplest elements of political science and the theory of our Government. But you have made it needful. You have put forth notions radically false and practically mischievous on fundamental questions; and you have done it in the way most calculated to impose on the minds of the ignorant and unthinking--by quietly assuming their truth. One wonders to see you apparently so unconscious of the utter contradiction between that which you take for granted and that which, in the general consent of respectable writers and thinkers, is held to be settled beyond debate. There is one at least among your associates (if I mistake not) who would be ashamed to stand godfather to your assumptions in regard to sovereignty and sovereign rights.