nce or for a minister is a great misfortune.
Shocking indeed it were if this misfortune could be lawfully
interpreted as his crime, and made the parent of a second misfortune,
ratifying the first by authorizing revolt of the people; and the more
so, as that first calamity would encourage traitors everywhere to
prepare the way for the second as a means of impunity for their own
treason. In the prospect of escaping at once from the burdens of war,
and from the penalties of broken vows to their sovereign, multitudes
would from the first enter into compromise and collusion with an
invader; and in this way they would create the calamity which they
charged upon their rulers as a desertion; they would create the
embarrassments for their government by which they hoped to profit, and
they would do this with an eye to the reversionary benefit anticipated
under the maxim here set up. True, they would often find their heavy
disappointment in the more grievous yoke of that invader whom they had
aided. But the temptation of a momentary gain would always exist for the
improvident many, if such a maxim were received into the law of nations;
and, if it would not always triumph, we should owe it in that case to
the blessing that God has made nations proud. Even in the case where men
had received a license from public law for deserting their sovereign,
thanks be to the celestial pride which is in man, few and anomalous
would be the instances in which they really _would_ do so. In reality it
must be evident that, under such a rule of Publicists, subjects must
stand in perpetual doubt whether the case had emerged or not which law
contemplated as the dissolution of their fealty. No man would say that a
province was licensed to desert, because the central government had lost
a battle. But a whole campaign, or ten campaigns, would stand in the
same predicament as a solitary battle, so long as the struggle was not
formally renounced by the sovereign. How many years of absolute
abandonment might justify a provincial people in considering themselves
surrendered to their own discretion, is a question standing on the
separate circumstances of each separate case. But generally it may be
said, that a ruler will be presumed justly _not_ to have renounced the
cause of resistance so long as he makes no treaty or compromise with the
enemy, and so long as he desists from open resistance only through
momentary exhaustion, or with a view to more elaborate pre