Lysander Spooner

In this cabal, the several local bands of robbers--the slaveholders of the South, the iron monopolists, the woollen monopolists, and the money monopolists, of the North--were represented.

It had been carried on, for some seventy years, by a mere cabal of irresponsible men, called lawmakers.

This government had been imposed, by a few property holders, upon a people too poor, too scattered, and many of them too ignorant, to resist.

It professedly rested all its authority on a certain paper called a constitution; a paper, I repeat, that nobody had ever signed, that few persons had ever read, that the great body of the people had never seen.

Here was a government that had never had any legitimate existence.

When such quarrels arise, it is not to be expected that either faction--having never had any regard to human rights, when acting in concert with the other--will hesitate at any new crimes that may be necessary to prolong its existence.

It has only shown to what desperate straits a government, founded on usurpation and fraud, and devoted to robbery and oppression, may be brought, by the quarrels that are liable to arise between the different factions--that is, the…

And if we had spent the same money and blood to destroy them, that we did to preserve them, it would have been ten thousand times more creditable to our intelligence and character as a people.

And being bound together by no honest tie, and existing for no honest purpose, destruction was the only honest doom to which any of them were entitled.

It, and the State governments--all but parts of one and the same system--were rotten with tyranny and crime.

The truth was that the government was in peril, solely because it was not fit to exist.

If such is the real character of the constitution, can any further proof be required of the necessity that it be buried out of sight at once and forever?