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I Bearing the Sword as God's Minister, j

1 A SERMON TO CITIZEN-SOLDIERS 1

PREACHED IN THE

1 Independent Presbyterian OhurGb, 1

SAVANNAH,

March 20th, 1887,

BY

LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON.

Published by Request of the Savannah
Volunteer Guards Battalion.

SAVANNAH:
TOWNSEND, PRINTER.
1887.

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Bearing the Sword as God's Minister.

A SERMON TO CITIZEN-SOLDIERS

preached in the

Independent Presbyterian Qburch,

SAVANNAH.

March 20th, 188/,

BY

LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON.

Published by Request of th^T'Savannah
Volunteer Guards Battalion.

SAVANNAH:
TOWNSEND, PRINTER.
1887.

SAVANNAH VOLUNTEER GUARDS BATTALION.
Secretary's Ofeice, April 15th, 1887.
At a meeting of the Savannah Volunteer Guards, held on the 11th
inst., the following resolutions were unanimously adopted :
Resolved, First. That the eloquent and powerful sermon entitled "Bearing
the Sword as God's Minister," delivered on March 20th, 1887, by the
Reverend Leonard Woolsey Bacon, D. D., at the Independent Presby- ,
terian Church, in this city, has been read with pleasure by the members
of this Battalion, and has made a profound impression upon them.
Such noble words from so distinguished a source cannot fail to do
great good, in furthering public interest in the Volunteer Military Com
mands of Georgia, and in strengthening the Commands themselves in
numbers and spirit.
If the truth of this sermon should be appreciated by the people of
Georgia, then, indeed, will the military organizations as "the bulwark of
the law, the guaranty of public order, the last appeal of imperiled gov
ernment," prosper and be sustained fittingly.
Second. That the grateful thanks of this Corps are extended to Dr.
Bacon for the delivery of this sermon and the Secretary will communi
cate to him the purport of these resolutions. T..P. RAVENEL,
Secretary S. V. G.

Bearing the Sword as God's Minister.

A SERMON TO CITIZEN-SOLDIERS.

Eomans, xii. 19 — xiii. 7. Avenge not yourselves, beloved, but
give place unto the wrath [of God ;] for it is written vengeance
belongeth to me ; I will recompense, saith the Lord. * * There
is no power but of God ; and the powers that be are ordained of
God. * * Wouldst thou have no fear of the power ? Do that
which is good, and thou shalt have praise from the same; for he is
a minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that
which is evil, be afraid ; for he beareth not the sword in vain : for
he is a minister of God. #¦ *
I. Peter, ii. 13 — 17. Be subject to every ordinance of man for
the Lord's sake ; whether it be to the King, as supreme ; or unto
Governors, as sent by him for vengeance on evil-doers and for
praise to them that do well. * * *
James, iv. II., 12. — Speak not one against another, brethren.
He that speaketh against a brother or judgeth his brother,
speaketh against the law, and judgeth the law ; but if thou
judge the law, thou art not a doer of the law but a judge.
One only is the law-giver and judge, even he who is able to
save and to destroy ; but who art thou that judgest thy neighbor?
These warnings in the Epistle of James are not
spoken concerning civil duties, but concerning
church duties. The members of the little local
brotherhoods to whom the epistle was sent are
warned against censoriousness and evil speaking,
because it was taking the law into their own hands,
when they were aggrieved, and righting themselves
by their own tongues, instead of leaving that to the

great Head and Governor of the Church, who would
redress all such wrongs in his own time. The rule
is given to Christians in the church; but the reason
for the rule is as wide as the whole field of civil
polity, and includes the duty of citizens to each
other and to the government. The language of it is
the statement of 'a political principle, which is
applied by way of illustration and accommodation
to the moral duties of the brethren in those primeval
Christian congregations. The man who takes the
law into his own hands to redress his own grievances
by pronouncing judgment on his fellow citizen, by
that act condemns the law and insults the govern
ment. He usurps the function of the State, and just
in the measure of the gravity of his act inflicts a
blow upon its authority. That the State is at hand,
with ample power, with willing intent, with prompt
alacrity, to do its duty, leaves him without excuse in
his invasion, of its prerogative. The Christian apostle
does more than teach this. He presumes it as a
thing recognized and accepted — a thing that may be
argued from as an admitted principle. It is a most im
pressive fact, containing more instruction and argu
ment than we now have time to draw out from it, that
these three Christian apostles, Peter, James and Paul,
so widely unlike in their modes of thought and ex
pression, should be accordant and constant in enun
ciating the fundamentals of political morality ; that
nowhere the instinct of vindictive justice — the angry
hatred of an unrighteous act, and the desire to have
it punished — As rebuked by them as wrong; that
constantly it is marked as a thing not to be sup
pressed, but to be held in restraint from private ex-

5
pression and satisfaction, because God has ordained
his own functionaries of civil government for this
very end; and the long oppressions and triumphs of
the wicked are to be made tolerable by the thought
that even when earthly governments fail of their duty
their failures will surely be redressed, and that with
no long delay, by the Judge of all the earth. "Dearly
beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather stand
aside and give place to the wrath of, God : for it is
written 'vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the
Lord.'" Maran atha — "the Lord is coming" — this
was the watchword of their patient waiting. Maran
atha, they would whisper to each other when
scorched by fiery trials. "Maran atha; the Lord is
at hand. Be patient; don't take the cause into your
own hands. Trust the government of the world.
Remember, the Judge is at the door." And this duty
of deferring to the government of God is joined, in
the system of Christian morals, to the duty of sub
mission to the existing government, whatever it may
be, as God's representative on earth.
This requirement to yield honor and obedience to
the institutions of human government as being God's
ordinance for punishment and reward, acquires im
mense emphasis from the circumstances in which it
was pronounced. These apostolic scriptures that
have come to us in the ends of the world for our in
struction were given at first (according to the com
mon method of the Bible) to a particular people,
with reference to a particular government at a par
ticular time. And what manner of government was
it which these Christians of the first age were re
quired in the name of their Lord to obey and honor

as God's ordinance for the execution of justice? This
"supreme king," the Roman Caesar, what is he? An
irresponsible despot whose tyrannical rule, through
process of military usurpation, has extinguished the
historic liberties of the Roman republic. That proud
people had taken the sword against the liberties of
the world, and in the height of their success their own
liberties had perished by the sword. God "gave them
a king in his anger;" and such a king ! "Thus I will !•
thus I choose! take my will for a reason" — this was
the constitution of the empire. "Martial law" is
defined to be "the will of the commanding officer."
The empire was martial law; the word emperor
means commander-in-chief. The emperor's word
dethroned princes and set up mean men on high. It
changed the face of kingdoms. The ends of the
earth suffered in the fluctuation of his caprices, and
Rome itself was his slave. The king was supreme.
The apostle's word is not one whit too strong. In the
authority which he arrogated, and in the adorations
which he accepted, the emperor was a blasphembus
usurper of dignities which belong to God alone.
And the "governors that were sent by the king" —
what were they? The mere creatures of the emperor's
whim, not instituted nor confirmed by any popular
choice, but commissioned in the name of the Caesar;
foreigners from distant Italy imposed upon the sub
ject nations by military force, and extorting a reluc
tant tribute from the people by means of an army of
odious publicans; — petty despots, the tools of a tyrant,
whose title to their authority lay in the strength of
their alien legions and the dreadful name of Rome.
And when we come to the personal character of

the rulers in question, what is it, as it appears in these
very documents of the apostles' age? The occupant
of the imperial throne, at the time, was that monster
whose vices have made the name of Nero a proverb
of wickedness in every language of Europe. The
"governors" were such men as the forcible-feeble
Pilate, the sneering Festus, the corrupt and rapacious
Felix, who (as Tacitus says of him) "wielded the
power of a king with the temper of a slave." And
the actual administration of this government was
sometimes a course of persecution which counted it
a crime to be a Christian, as to be a thief or a
murderer. Such were the me"h, and this was the thing, to
which these harmless Christians were required to
yield submission and honor, first, as a divine insti-
tion, and then as a beneficent institution. There is
nothing here about legitimate titles — nothing about
natural or constitutional rights — nothing about the
consent of the governed. Nothing but the bare duty
of submitting, with deference and respect, to one of
the most corrupt, tyrannical, usurping and unjust
governments in human history, just because, for the
time being, it was the power, and,1 being the power,
was God's ordinance, and God's ordinance for good'.
It is hardly possible for any government to be so bad
but that it will do more good than evil. Its acts of
wrong and injustice, however frequent, will be the
exceptions, and its common course will be for the
punishment of malefactors and the praise of them
that do well. It was one of the noblest characters
in English history — Richard Baxter — who, having
suffered much from one of the vilest of governments,

declared nevertheless that the worst of all govern
ments was better than anarchy. So long as the
power is the power, able to assert, maintain, vindi
cate and enforce itself, subfnission to it is not only a
necessity but a duty.
It is only when the power ceases to be power and
becomes impotency, and the real power passes into
other hands, that the right and duty of revolution
can arise. There may sometimes be occasion for a
struggle to decide where the power really is, when
that is in doubt. But when this question is settled
that must be the end. Mere futile resistance to settled
governments is a crime and always a crime. This
is Christian morality, and it is sound political phi
losophy. Neither in Christianity nor in polity is
there any provision for assassins or dynamite con
spirators. There is no right residing anywhere to
make turbulent and aimless resistance of law, or to
begin hopelessly unsuccessful revolutions.
This seems a hard saying to you — this command
of submission. It will be a hard saying until we
come to apprehend the double application that it has
to us Americans. To the subjects of a great empire
the New Testament Scriptures prescribed the duty of
submission ; to its rulers they prescribed the duty of
using the sword of power efficiently and for the
enforcement of justice. You will never fully under
stand, fellow citizen, the bearing of this teaching on
your duty, unless you learn to see its relation to you
as being in your own person both subject and ruler.
You have thought yourself, perhaps, not exactly one
thing nor the other, but something between the two,
with not much subordination as the subject, and not

9
much responsibility as the ordained of God to civil
power and trust. A low and unworthy conception
both of your duty and your dignity ! Your authority
in that trust of government with which you are
invested, bears with it not less of the sanction of the
King of kings than did that of the grandest Csesar
that ever throned himself amid the glories of the
Palatine Hill, or that of the most legitimately
descended Stuart or Bourbon that ever wrote himself
"king by the grace of God." And on the other
hand there is no duty of submission to existing
government that was demanded in the name of the
Lord from the humblest Christian under the domin
ion of the Roman Empire, that does not devolve on
us reinforced by ten-fold sanctions unknown to them
of old time. The American citizen is not the less a
subject for holding in his hand a share in the
supreme authority of the State. He is not one inch
the less a king for being the most loyal and faithful
of subjects. It is one natural consequence of those
false Jacobin notions of the merely human sanction
of government, which we love to teach to each other
and to our children,that we lose that religious rever
ence for human law whicli is an essential article of
Christian morality; that we think it a light matter
to be unfaithful to laws of our own making ; inso
much that so acute an observer as Herbert Spencer
declares that he recognizes in American society a
marked "decay of the sentiment of justice," and that
a judicious writer of our own characterizes the ten
dency of this age by saying that we are becoming "a
nation of law-breakers."*

* " Dangerous Tendencies in American Society.'

10
And now, fellow citizens, having spoken to you,
in the first place of your duty of obeying, I turn —
II. ---In the second place, to speak to you of your
duty of enforcing obedience. By just as much as it
is your duty, being subjects, to submit to those
powers which by God's ordinance bear the sword ;
by just so much is it your duty, being ordained of
God as rulers, to bear the sword, and bear it not in
-vain. The sword : it is a lethal weapon, meant to
maim and slay. To bear the sword : it means, being
translated into current forms of modern speech, to
wield not only the policeman's club, but the musket
and bayonet, to handle the battalion, to train the
Gatling gun. And this terrible duty it is, which, by
virtue of that supreme civil authority wherewith you,
the citizens, are divinely invested, is imposed upon
you, and which you are charged to fulfill not vainly,
as giving account thereof to God.
Put away from your mind that debased and un
worthy notion that government is a system of coax
ing and humoring by which everything is to be
made pleasant to everybody. It widely infects the
American mind from the misreading of that doubtful
aphorism that "governments derive their just powers
from the consent of the governed," an aphorism
which is doubtless capable of being read in a true
sense, but which is commonly and most mischiev
ously read in a false one. Settle it clearly in your
minds that government implies law, and that law is
something more than good advice; that the statute
book is not, as some zealous reformers seem disposed
to consider it, a volume of moral essays, nor the Legis
lature a sort of Tract Society on a large scale,* whose

11
business it is to enact "prohibitory" laws, for the
sake of moral impression, without reference to their
being enforced; understand that law is notlaw.unless
it is enforced by penalty; and that civil penalty can
be enforced because, in the las*fc resort, those military
powers that are symbolized in that syllable "the
sword," are ready to be wielded whenever the emer
gency requires. I have seen too much — we all of us
have seen too much, though not so much as we are
likely to see before we are done with it— rof the mis
erable working of the idea that the art of good
administration consisted in a genial compromise — a
tacit compromise, of course — with law-breakers; in
judicious winking at the lesser, and sometimes the
greater crimes ; and in a happy-go-lucky getting along
with things until after the next election ; that
the criminal classes have their rights as such, and
that if they do not have rights, they certainly have
votes, so that it is very unwise to alienate their good
will, and that a good local government ought not to
be in violently unfriendly relations with brothels
and tippling houses, and gambling hells.
0 citizens, give no harbor in your mind to such
base and cowardly and wicked thoughts. Fully
settle it in your heart, as fundamental among your
political principles, that the only right, the only
prudent, the only tranquil relation of society toward
persistent law-breakers, is a relation of unceasing
war. The supreme ruler, whether it be the emperor or
the body of the citizens, must of course, wield the
sword of society in part by other hands. It is his
responsibility — your responsibility, O citizens, for

. 12
you are the supreme ruler here — to see that it is
.committed to hands that are both able and faithful.
Make sure that the executive head of such a commu
nity as this is not a man who is too popular. Let
him be a man, always, who hates a scoundrel, and
whom scoundrels hate and fear. Whenever your votes
are solicited for "our universally popular fellow-citi
zen" for Mayor, don't vote for him. You have no use
for that kind of a man in that place. Find some one to
vote for who is not quite so popular. And make sure
that the high executive trusts, both civil and mili
tary, are held by men of nerve as well as discretion —
men who know there is only one humane way to
use the sword, and that is the prompt, swift, severe
way ; men who won't be guilty of the inhumanity of
firing blank cartridges, or firing overhead — a course
that never yet was taken' with a mob without in
volving five-fold manslaughter — men, who will not
flinch from severity against rioters out of considera
tion for "innocent bystanders," but who knows that
the bystander in a riot isn't innocent, but is an in
tegral though inactive part of the riot, without
whose presence the riot would promptly cease — men
the very names of whom, whispered among the mob,
when the bayonet tips are seen above the crowd,
will be the sure promise of bloody wounds and death
to some one, quick, sudden, as soon as the last syl
lable of the riot act is read, if there is any crowd left
by the time that syllable is reached. Such officers
are humane. All others are cruel, like that tender
hearted sheriff in Cincinnati three years ago, whose
warning to the militia to fire overhead involved- the
slaying and maiming of two hundred people.

13
But, citizens, and especially young citizens, this
wielding of the sword by proxy, by committing it to
brave and resolute hands, is not the whole of your
duty in the case. You can not be quit of your re
sponsibility to God for your share in the govern
ment on any such easy terms. The duty of bearing
arms in the maintenance of that government in the
royal dignity of which God has by birthright given
you a share, is a personal duty not to be fulfilled by
the payment of a commutation tax, or the finding of
a substitute. What the State wants in this service
is not your paltry dollar or two, or your cheap man ;
it wants you. The reasons which some one will
perhaps allege to his own mind to excuse him from
this personal service in arms are reasons why he
ought to serve. Have you many cares for business
and property? This should be the first of them.
Do you enjoy the quiet of your own fireside? This
is the protection of it. Have you high social posi
tion and tastes to which the associations of the ser
vice are uncongenial ? Then you are the very man
that is wanted in the ranks to make it evident that
that position is beneath no man's dignity. Do you
suspect that you would encounter some things there
that would not be agreeable to your feelings as a
Christian disciple? Then it is the very place where
you are wanted. You would much rather join the
Young Men's Christian Association, and seek some
opportunity of Christian usefulness there ? If you can
not do both, you would much better join a militia
company, and behave yourself therein as a good sol
dier of Jesus Christ. It is as good an opportunity of
Christian usefulness as you are likely to find anywhere.

14
Perhaps there is some young man here whose ex
cuse to himself for shirking this common duty of a
good citizen is this, that he is always ready, when
the exigency arises, to come out and give his service
to the cause of law and order. Very likely you are,
or think you are. There are commonly men enough,
when, for lack of adequate force to begin with, the
mob has gathered head, and property and govern
ment are in peril — men enough to rush tumultuously
together and form something like a second mob to
fight the first. But this is not what society wants of
you. It needs your steady, trained and disciplined
support. It does not want you by and by to put
down a riot. It wants you now, so well equipped,
so drilled to soldierly duties, so conscious of the
touch of your comrade's elbow, that no riot shall
ever dare begin. You are impatient of this mere
sham and show of military service — this child's-play
of martial dress and parade? It is a childish notion
indeed in you to suppose that this is nothing but
child's-play. It is manly work. The holiday parade
that displays through these noble and historic streets
the formidable battalions of a well-equipped militia
drawn from the best citizenship, is something more *
than holiday parade; it is law; it is government; it
is public order and security. The latent conscious
ness that such a force exists invisible in the midst of
society, and that, in an hour, from shops and fac
tories, from banks and counting rooms, from schools
of learning and libraries of elegant leisure, the sum
mons of the State would evoke it, as the horn of
Roderick Dhu called his clansmen forth from every
rock and bush — this it is, that makes the baton of

15
an unarmed constabulary as potent as the cannon,
and causes the courage of the most audacious crim
inal to wither and collapse, when the sheriff's fin
ger taps him upon the shoulder. That is the truly ef
ficient militia which is so efficient that it never has to
be called on for any service but drill and parade, and
never fires ball cartridges except at targets. The
battalions that are sneered at by fools as dandy regi
ments and carpet-knights, never seeing actual service
nor doing any but parade duty, may well be satisfied
with the record that they have borne the sword as
ministers of God, and borne it so far from in vain,
that there never has been need to stain it with the
blood of an extinguished insurrection.
I confess, and am glad to make the confession thus >
publicly, that never, anywhere in the world, have I
been in a community where such arguments as these
could seem so nearly superflous as here in Savannah.
If I wished to boast among my friends in other
regions of the distinguishing honors of my new
home, I should be at no loss for amiable and admira
ble things of which to speak, but pre-eminent among
them I should name its incomparable organization
of civic soldiers, the bulwark of the law, the guaranty
of public order, the last appeal of imperiled govern
ment. But these arguments are not superfluous,
even here, however they may seem so. For if the
character of this honorable service is to be main
tained against the continually recurring tendency to
decline and de'cay, it will be due to the well-
instructed conscience of the younger citizens.
It is not enough that the young gentlemen of
Savannah are now enlisted in this service. They must

16
know the good and serious reasons why they ought
in conscience be so enlisted. If this service is recom
mended only by frivolous reasons — social prestige,
gay uniforms, competitions in drill, the esprit du
corps— then depend upon it that, as life grows more
earnest and its struggles more severe, under the new
constitution of society, earnest men will quit the
service and only frivolous men, or worse, will adhere
to it, and so, in progress of time, the character of the
service will decline. And if it does decline — ah well !
I need not prophesy. Some awful page of future
American history will tell our posterity what fol
lowed, in some of the now approaching conflicts of
society, in certain States in which the militia was
left to be recruited and officered from the whisky
shop and the beer garden.
I have spoken to you (I.) of the Christian duty of
submitting to government; and (II.) of the Christian
duty of enforcing submission to government. It
ought not to take long now to show —
III. — That the one object of maintaining the
power of government, and the sole condition on
which, in the long run, this power can be maintained,
is this, that it should be used in the interest of
righteousness. When this object is habitually de
feated, and this condition fails, government will still
go on for awhile — longer or shorter — until by and
by suddenly it finds that the strength has gone out
from it; and losing its strength it has lost its right;
for God has ordained the powers that be — he has not
ordained the imbecilities and impotences that be.
Or it will find a new power suddenly emerging,
whose strength lies in the failure of the government

17
to fulfill the vital functions of government, and
which snatches at the reins of authority, intent, for
the time, to usurp and perform the abdicated duty.
And this compels a fight — short or long — a riot, we
call it, if it is brief— a civil war, if it is protracted ;
in either case, a miserable shame and calamity in any
State or nation. Compels, I say ; for such insults to
its authority, such invasions of its most sacred pre
rogative, government must resist, or must by and by
perish. It must declare and must make good its
word by whatever force may be required, that no
mob shall usurp its God-given prerogative of executing
justice upon criminals ; and from every stirring of the
"wild justice" of the populace, must learn the salu
tary lesson that the government which holds its pre
rogative only to neglect and pervert it, will not hold
it long. The ruler who bears the sword, and bears
the sword in vain, will presently not bear the sword
at all.
For this clear teaching of the New Testament is
corroborated by the common experience of society,
and especially the wretched experience of many of
our own States. The violent invasion and usurpation
of the prerogatives of government will surely take
place, in the form either of private revenge or of wild
Lynch-court justice, whenever society has lost confi
dence in the administration of justice by the State.
The infallible consequence of the abdication by the
State of the duty of punishing criminals is not that
criminals are safe from punishment, but that that
grave function is delivered over to the wild, uncertain
justice of the mob, or the frantic hand of private
vengeance. Where lies the safeguard of public order

18
in times of public indignation against atrocious
crime? Does it lie in the truncheons of a drilled,
constabulary? in the bayonets of an organized militia?
in the squadrons and batteries of a standing army?
Yes, here ; but not here alone. Back of all these lies
the conviction, deep in men's minds, that the Law may
be trusted to punish. This it is which suffers the sus
pected criminal to lie safe for the time within the
prison walls. This speaks to the heady passion of
revenge and says, "put up thy sword, for they who
take the sword shall perish by the sword." God him
self deigns to make appeal to this confidence in his
public justice, saying, in Paul, "Avenge not your
selves ; give place to my wrath ; vengeance is mine ; I
will repay." And when human government cannot
make like appeal, constabularies or militia can avail
only for awhile. The instinct of a wild justice flings
aside police clubs like grass, and bayonets like rotten
wood, and leaps like a tiger on its victim. Lynch
law, private assassination, do not prevail in com
munities where strong and faithful government is
quick to follow crime with adequate penalty. Such
acts as these are the opprobrium of any government,
as it is written, "he that judgeth his brother judgeth
the law." The murder of every assassinated malefac
tor, of every victim of the Lynch court, is recorded
to the shame of a delinquent State. When I hear it
whispered, as I do hear it with regard to a recent
crime of peculiar malignity,* that there are crimi
nals whom the police cannot be trusted to pursue and
*The question whether this suspicion had any just ground, was quite
aside from my argument. But I am glad to say that, judging from such
information as I have since had access to, there was nothing in the inci
dent referred to, to sustain it.

19
seize, then I know what to expect. Whether the sus
picion be just or unjust, if it continues, it will do its
work. There will by and by be assaults, assassina
tions, mobs and Lynch courts.
That defeat of public justice which is the peril of our
commonwealths is traceable to its several sources in
all the three departments, the Legislative, the Judicial,
the Executive.
1 The Legislative. For in many, not to say most,
of the American States, a shameful tradition of Eng
lish law prevails, by which those crimes which above
all others most incite to fierce and deadly vengeance,
— crimes against the sanctity of the family, like adul
tery and seduction — are, either by legislation, or for
want of legislation, excepted from the list of crimes
that are known to the penal law. And with what
result? To inaugurate a common law, set forth, not,
indeed, in judicial decisions, but in jury verdicts,
which authorizes assassination, which constitutes the
assassin a popular hero, and erects the open, unblush
ing perjury of juries into a public virtue. By legis
lation like this, government abdicates one of its prime
functions, and remands society to the old savage law
of blood-revenge, with no provision of cities of refuge
with which to mitigate its fierceness.
2. The reponsibility for the defeat of justice resides
in part in the Judicial department of the State, and
specially and notoriously in the way in which the jury
system is operated for the protection of known crimi
nals from just and lawful punishment. The mischief
wrought by certain bad and false traditions of English
law, which were never right, but are more than ever
false and demoralizing when they are brought into

20
this country and this century, discredits the law in
the minds of the people. The old fiction — which was
always a fiction — that the motive of a criminal prose
cution is the personal animosity of the king against
the accused, is the teeming mother of other fictions
yet that still survive on this side the sea, and dis
turb the equal course of criminal justice. We made
our declaration of independence a hundred*years ago,
but we shall not have gotten through with establish
ing our independence until more of the corollaries
of that old maxim of despotism have been eliminated
from the course of criminal procedure.
, 3. The responsibility for the defeat of justice re
sides in part in the Executive department of the
State, in consequence of the perversion, perhaps we
ought rather to say in consequence of the existence,
of the pardoning power. There never yet has been
in any State, a Governor so wise, so virtuous, so reso
lute, that it was safe to trust him with the pardoning
power. There is no State in which the pardoning
power, wherever vested, is habitually used, that
would not be stronger and happier if there were no
pardoning power at all. Generally speaking the par
doning power is simply an expedient for sacrificing
the immense interest which society has in the con
stant, steadfast, impartial course of public law and
justice to the individual interest of her least deserv
ing members. The commonest and most plausible
pretext for the use of the pardoning power is a self-
stultification — the claim, in a given case, that later
disclosures of fact have made it probable that the
prisoner was unjustly convicted. Such a case as this
is no case for pardon. Send back the man to the

21
courts to be tried anew, under all the advantages and
all the difficulties of a judicial investigation ; and
then, if he can make good his claim, send him forth
into society, not a guilty man pardoned, but an in
nocent and injured man acquitted and vindicated ;
and if there is to be any pardoning done, let the
State, in the person of its highest officers, go humbly
suing to the feet of this innocent and liberated pris
oner, and ask him to pardon the State for the wrong
that it has inflicted on him ; but let us have done
with this demoralizing and absurd business of pardon
ing innocent men for having committed no crime.
And let us have done to the very utmost with the
business of "executive clemency" — clemency to the
criminal that is cruelty to the State. Abolish the
pardoning power, and it might no longer be impossible
for the State to avoid the dreadful necessity of the
gallows.* Thus, reminded by the splendid martial pageant of
the last month, I have set before you something of that
serious meaning of it all, which is so commonly lost
out of sight and mind. I leave with you these
lessons, derived directly from the teachings of the Old
and New Testaments, and addressed to all citizens, and
especially to citizen-soldiers.
1. The duty of obedience to law and constituted
government. 2. The duty of enforcing obedience to law, (a) by
*It is no obscure or difficult argument which demonstrates that every
end which ought to be sought by means of the pardoning power could be
better attained, with more safety and certainty, by legislative provi
sions which should substitute an orderly judicial process for the arbi
trary intervention of " personal government," at the discretion of an
Executive officer.

22
vesting its executive powers in capable and faithful
men; (6) by personal service in bearing arms.
3. The duty of seeing to it that government is so
administered, in all its departments, Legislative,
Judicial, Executive, in the steadfast, sure execution
of justice on evil-doers, that the enforcement of obedi
ence shall not be impossible.
And for the fulfillment of this great and solemn
trust, 0 citizens, may God give you an understanding
mind,, a strong and courageous heart, and a will
inflexible and incorrupt. Amen.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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