15 the subject takes of God’s adherence and valuation of his own laws ; so in human governments the authority of the laws rests mainly upon the estimate the people see the government itself places upon the laws it enacts for their direction, manifested in the faithfulness of their execution. This is especially true of the great mass of men who habitually press to the utmost verge of impunity and are restrained from committing outrage upon the rights of others mainly by the sanctions of human laws. And however men may reason upon the theory of our own government, that public officers, or in other words, the active power of the government, are but the agents of the intelligent minds of the nation, still there are no minds so pure, so much in unison with the spirit of law, but that when they look to the enactments of their own agents, though their laws should be dipt from the statute book of the One Lawgiver, they feel something of the restraints of law, and something of the feeling of antagonism, which springs from hearts at variance in some degree with the spirit of the enactments, and in proportion as they do they are capable of being injured by the example of their own agents. Because men may enact laws by themselves or agents, which are just and good, it by no means follows that they will either properly obey or execute them. Men make laws with their heads, but obey them with their hearts. Republicans make a government purporting to be the expression of their wisdom and justice ; the officers are elected as exponents of these, and their actions operate upon the people with a double influence, from the fact that they have chosen them as worthy, and they are apt to sanction and applaud what the government is in fact for what it ought to be. Il it disregards the obligation and value of law, law will sink
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