Our opponents often remind us of their pretence, that we are under no more restrictions than other citizens; we may do as we please about keeping the seventh day. To this we reply, that the tyrants of the Roman people deprived the Republic of its liberties by professing themselves the guardians of their INTERESTS. "By declaring themselves the protectors of the people, Marius and Cæsar had subverted the Constitution of their country." Augustus established a despotism by artfully affecting to be governed himself by the same laws which he procured to be enacted to take away the rights of the people. These are the same principles upon which religious coercionists conjure us to be quiet under the loss of our constitutional rights. The progress of these things towards despotism is as dangerous in the American Republic as in that of Rome, and may be as rapid. Their success would be as deadly to human happiness, and all the best interests of mankind, in the nineteenth century, as they were in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Human nature now affords no better guaranty for the safety of _our_ national rights, than it did to the Romans at the summit of their greatness. Liberty can be preserved only at the expense of perpetual vigilance, and by the popular support of individual rights. If ever the doctrine which has been urged before one of our legislative bodies, "The greatest good of the greatest number," should become a popular political axiom, to justify the course of the many in taking away the rights of the few, the halls of legislation will become scaffolds for the execution of liberty, and that odious principle will be the shroud in which it will be buried. Despots may establish a round of religious observances, and exact an unwilling and insincere conformity to their arbitrary prescriptions; but they can never convince the understanding nor win the heart of one who knows the voice of truth. They can only make him a slave, while the effects of their arbitrary prescriptions on the popular mind will be to wither up all interest in the religious tendencies of an observance sustained only by the enactments of heartless politicians. All that makes religion vital and effective for its own holy objects, expires when the sword is drawn to enforce it. Liberty, humanity, religion, and our National Constitution, then, require that the laws enforcing the observance of the first day of the week should be repealed.