It has been well said that all law and all volition must be in harmony with the will of the Good Spirit, or with that of the evil one; and if we will not reënact the will of the former, then, either all legislation ceases, or we must register the decrees of the latter.
Mann discusses the necessity of aligning laws with a higher moral authority.
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The general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much land, badly, for present gain,--in short, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
They cannot do otherwise with laborers who work by compulsion, for the benefit only of their masters, and whose sole interest in the matter is to do as little and to consume as much as possible.
So far as legal rights against his oppressors are concerned, the slave lives in such a world of darkness.
Mere knowledge, without the moral sense, can take no cognizance of the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong; and so the blind instinct, unguided by knowledge, will be forever at fault in its conclusions.
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