"Slavery in Massachussets" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thoreau Henry David)

maker, with it, like the dirt- bug and its ball.

Recent events will be valuable as a criticism on the
administration of justice in our midst, or, rather, as showing what
are the true resources of justice in any community. It has come to
this, that the friends of liberty, the friends of the slave, have
shuddered when they have understood that his fate was left to the
legal tribunals of the country to be decided. Free men have no faith
that justice will be awarded in such a case. The judge may decide this
way or that; it is a kind of accident, at best. It is evident that
he is not a competent authority in so important a case. It is no time,
then, to be judging according to his precedents, but to establish a
precedent for the future. I would much rather trust to the sentiment
of the people. In their vote you would get something of some value, at
least, however small; but in the other case, only the trammeled
judgment of an individual, of no significance, be it which way it
might.

It is to some extent fatal to the courts, when the people are
compelled to go behind them. I do not wish to believe that the
courts were made for fair weather, and for very civil cases merely;
but think of leaving it to any court in the land to decide whether
more than three millions of people, in this case a sixth part of a
nation, have a right to be freemen or not! But it has been left to the
courts of justice, so called- to the Supreme Court of the land- and,
as you all know, recognizing no authority but the Constitution, it has
decided that the three millions are and shall continue to be slaves.
Such judges as these are merely the inspectors of a pick-lock and
murderer's tools, to tell him whether they are in working order or
not, and there they think that their responsibility ends. There was
a prior case on the docket, which they, as judges appointed by God,
had no right to skip; which having been justly settled, they would
have been saved from this humiliation. It was the case of the murderer
himself.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the
law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law
when the government breaks it.

Among human beings, the judge whose words seal the fate of a man
furthest into eternity is not he who merely pronounces the verdict
of the law, but he, whoever he may be, who, from a love of truth,
and unprejudiced by any custom or enactment of men, utters a true
opinion or sentence concerning him. He it is that sentences him.
Whoever can discern truth has received his commission from a higher
source than the chiefest justice in the world who can discern only
law. He finds himself constituted judge of the judge. Strange that
it should be necessary to state such simple truths!

I am more and more convinced that, with reference to any public