rmal enactment. Meddling fools try to choke them, pass
acts against them even, think they can annihilate such convictions. One
day the convictions insist on being heard, if not by formal law, then by
terrible informal protest against some legalized wrong. Think how
laboriously lawmakers have toiled to prevent the expression of the
Nation's determined convictions on the subject of Slavery! Think of the
end! Nay, all enactments which accord with these deep decisions of the
National Conscience, which help them to better expression and clearer
acknowledgment, are the real Laws of the Land. All that oppose these
decisions, though passed by triumphant majorities, with loud jubilation,
and fastened on the Nation as its sense of right, are mere rubbish, sure
to be swept away as the waves of the National life roll on.

We, by no means, hold that even the best nation, in its most living
laws, always declares perfect truth and perfect right. Human errors and
weaknesses enter into all things with which men deal. And the Nation is
ordered and guided by men. Nevertheless the Nation is an authorized
teacher of morals, and these errors are the accidents of the
institution. They are not of its essence. So far as they exist, they
block its working, they stand in its way. Pure, clear Justice is the
perfect ideal toward which a living, advancing Nation aims. That it
daily come nearer this ideal is the basis of its permanence. And,
meanwhile, though the result be far from attained, we none the less hold
that the Law of the Nation is, to every man within it, the Law of God.
His business, as a wise man, is to accept it, obey it, help it to
amendment where he believes there is error, with all patience and
loyalty.

For the first disorder in the makeup of man is wilfulness. The child
kicks and scratches in his cradle. It wants to have its own small will.
The first lesson it has to learn is the lesson of submission, that the
untried world, into which it is thrust, is not a place of self-pleasing
but of law. It takes parents and teachers years to get that fact through
the stubborn youngster's head. It will burn its fingers, it will tumble
down stairs, it will pitch head first over fences, because it will not
learn to forego its own small, ignorant will, and submit to wiser and
larger wills. In the good old days they used to think that matter ought
to be learned in childhood once for all, and they labored faithfully to
convince us urchins, by the