l sometimes occur. Duties will sometimes cross one another. Then
questions will arise, which of them is to be placed in subordination?
which of them may be entirely superseded? These doubts give rise to that
part of moral science called _casuistry_, which though necessary to be
well studied by those who would become expert in that learning, who aim
at becoming what I think Cicero somewhere calls _artifices officiorum_,
it requires a very solid and discriminating judgment, great modesty and
caution, and much sobriety of mind in the handling; else there is a
danger that it may totally subvert those offices which it is its object
only to methodize and reconcile. Duties, at their extreme bounds, are
drawn very fine, so as to become almost evanescent. In that state some
shade of doubt will always rest on these questions, when they are
pursued with great subtilty. But the very habit of stating these extreme
cases is not very laudable or safe; because, in general, it is not right
to turn our duties into doubts. They are imposed to govern our conduct,
not to exercise our ingenuity; and therefore our opinions about them
ought not to be in a state of fluctuation, but steady, sure, and
resolved.

Amongst these nice, and therefore dangerous points of casuistry, may be
reckoned the question so much agitated in the present hour,--Whether,
after the people have discharged themselves of their original power by
an habitual delegation, no occasion can possibly occur which may
justify the resumption of it? This question, in this latitude, is very
hard to affirm or deny: but I am satisfied that no occasion can justify
such a resumption, which would not equally authorize a dispensation with
any other moral duty, perhaps with all of them together. However, if in
general it be not easy to determine concerning the lawfulness of such
devious proceedings, which must be ever on the edge of crimes, it is far
from difficult to foresee the perilous consequences of the resuscitation
of such a power in the people. The practical consequences of any
political tenet go a great way in deciding upon its value. Political
problems do not primarily concern truth or falsehood. They relate to
good or evil. What in the result is likely to produce evil is
politically false; that which is productive of good, politically true.

Believing it, therefore, a question at least arduous in the theory, and
in the practice very critical, it would become us to ascertain as w