The Law of the Land: Of Miss Lady, Whom It Involved in Mystery, and of John Eddring, Gentleman of the South, Who Read Its Deeper Meaning: A NovelHough, Emerson
General
The Law of the Land: Of Miss Lady, Whom It Involved in Mystery, and of John Eddring, Gentleman of the South, Who Read Its Deeper Meaning: A Novel
Hough, Emerson
Southern States -- Fiction
"Now I say this, and I say, also, let each of us have a care lest he
lose touch with the eternal pillar of the truth. There it is. It
rises before you, gentlemen, that silent, somber shaft. It finds its
summit in the sky. I pray God to keep my own hand in touch thereto,
and my eyes turned not aside. And my life, with that of these others,
is offered freely in proof that we covet not lawlessness, but the
law! We are white men, and where the white man has gone, there has he
builded ever, first of all, his temple of the law. Upon whatever land
the Anglo-Saxon sets his foot, of that land he is the master, or
there he finds his grave. First he lays his hearthstone, and upon
that foundation he builds his temple of the law. A race which has no
hearthstone knows no law.
"Inasmuch as God has made all manner of things diverse, setting no
fence even between species and species, creating all blades of grass
alike, yet not one the duplicate of another; then neither should we,
being human, essay a wisdom greater than that of the eternal
compromise of life. No human document, no sum of human wisdom, not
even the Deity of all life can or does guarantee a success which
means individual equality in the result of effort. The chance, the
opportunity--that is the law, and that is all the law. Beyond that
did not go the intent of that Divinity which decreed the scheme under
which this earth must endure. To war and conflict each creature is
foreordained, for so runs the decree of life. But never, in the
divine wisdom, was it established that the mouth of the stream should
be its source; that inequality should be equality; that failure
should be success; that unfitness should mean survival.
"In reading the pages of the great and beloved Constitution of
America there have been those who have juggled the import of the word
'success' with the meaning of the _chance to succeed_.
"There was such juggling in those war amendments to that
Constitution, which to-day represent the folly of a part of America--
not of all of America. Those amendments, if they be not of themselves
war measures, were at least consequences of war measures. This
Constitution which we call supreme can, of itself, be amended--can,
indeed, itself be set aside by its own servants, as was proved in
that very war whose memory is still in our minds. The Supreme Court,
in the Legal Tender case, admittedly set aside the Constitution. It
did so of necessity, and as a measure demanded by the times of war.
The supreme letter of the law has not always been respected by this
people, nor by its wisest men, by its most august servants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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