, or
the senate, or the executive, or the judges, one of them. There is no
more absurdity in giving a jury a veto upon the laws, than there is in
giving a veto to each of these other tribunals. The people are no more
arrayed against themselves, when a jury puts its veto upon a statute,
which the other tribunals have sanctioned, than they are when the same
veto is exercised by the representatives, the senate, the executive, or
the judges.

But another answer to the argument that the people are arrayed against
themselves, when a jury hold an enactment of the government invalid, is,
that the government, and all the departments of the government, _are
merely the servants and agents of the people_; not invested with
arbitrary or absolute authority to bind the people, but required to
submit all their enactments to the judgment of a tribunal more fairly
representing the whole people, before they carry them into execution, by
punishing any individual for transgressing them. If the government were
not thus required to submit their enactments to the judgment of "the
country," before executing them upon individuals--if, in other words,
the people had reserved to themselves no veto upon the acts of the
government, the government, instead of being a mere servant and agent of
the people, would be an absolute despot over the people. It would have
all power in its own hands; because the power to _punish_ carries all
other powers with it. A power that can, of itself, and by its own
authority, punish disobedience, can compel obedience and submission, and
is above all responsibility for the character of its laws. In short, it
is a despotism.

And it is of no consequence to inquire how a government came by this
power to punish, whether by prescription, by inheritance, by usurpation,
or by delegation from the people? _If it have now but got it_, the
government is absolute.

It is plain, therefore, that if the people have invested the government
with power to make laws that absolutely bind the people, and to punish
the people for transgressing those laws, the people have surrendered
their liberties unreservedly into the hands of the government.

It is of no avail to say, in answer to this view of the case, that in
surrendering their liberties into the hands of the government, the
people took an oath from the government, that it would exercise its
power within certain constitutional limits; for when did oaths ever
restrain a government t