The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: fearful a mistake?
All profess to be content in the Union if all Constitutional rights
can be maintained. Is it true, then, that any right, plainly written
in the Constitution, has been denied? I think not. Happily the human
mind is so constituted that no party can reach to the audacity of doing this.
Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision
of the Constitution has ever been denied. If by the mere force of numbers a
majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written Constitutional right,
it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution--certainly would if such
a right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of
minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations
|