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
impossible and not practicable, which is merciless instead of just,
which is cruel instead of being kind, and most cruel to those whom it
is thought to shelter. Meantime the South feels still the intolerable
weight of that Constitution, the intolerable sting of the demand of
her northern brothers, that she shall be asked to endure, in the name
of this incubus, this body of the law, the continuous burglarizing of
her honor and her prosperity--the burglarizing of the house of her
society.
"We know that it is the chiefest of cruelty and unkindness, the
chiefest of madness, to incite these poor and ignorant people--ever
ready to follow the voice of sophistry or selfishness--to believe
that their burglary of the house of success is right and reasonable;
because it is certain that such burglary will be met in the South by
the law, by the White Justice, and that, if need be, until either
white or black man shall exist no more in this portion of America.
Gentlemen, North and South owe it to America, America owes it to the
world, that there be held aloft for our worship an image of the Law
more honorable than this. Until that time of a more honorable image
for our worship, there must perhaps go on the enormous folly of one
portion of this nation asking another portion to destroy itself for
the sake of an unworthy race. This demand, gentlemen, I take to be an
actual treason to the law and to this country.
"The white man has won his rights--why? Because he was able to do so.
He accords to any other race the same privilege. That is the law of
survival; it is greater than any law of politics, greater than any
statute law.
"But, your Honor, these men can not be acquitted under any plea
dealing with generalizations alone. The law of the land must be
observed in so far as that law exists.
"Now I ask whether at the time of the acts charged against Calvin
Blount there existed any adequate machinery of the law. I have
pointed out to you the precedent of the great case handled by Mr.
Webster in the city of New York, in which case the statutes were set
aside by the greater law of an immediate and overpowering necessity.
I submit to you that necessity, the greatest of all laws, and in
precedent respected by our courts as such, would have overridden even
the regular machinery of our laws had it been in operation. I submit
further to you that no law existed in this country at that time; that
the service of the law to its citizens had ceased. If the greatest
court of the country still tolerates the burglary of the house of
society by this so-called manhood suffrage, which should rather be
called the per capita suffrage, then at least the lesser courts,
wiser than the greater, recognize the fact that some crimes require
no warrant for arrest; that sometimes the citizen is court and
executive in one and at once.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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