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Updated: May 5, 2025
Belloc says that The Servile State was written "to maintain and prove the following truth": That our free modern society in which the means of production are owned by a few being necessarily in unstable equilibrium, it is tending to reach a condition of stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labour legally enforcible upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do.
For several years the residents of Hull-House struggled with the difficulty of prohibiting the sale of cocaine to minors under a totally inadequate code of legislation, which has at last happily been changed to one more effective and enforcible. The long effort brought us into contact with dozens of boys who had become victims of the cocaine habit.
It does not take long for a "self-governed" people to learn that it is not really governed that an agreement enforcible by nobody but the parties to it is not binding. We are learning this very rapidly: we set aside our laws whenever we please. The sovereign power the tribunal of ultimate jurisdiction is a mob. It may destroy property and life.
Every enforcible bond must be in writing and under seal. The maker of a bond by the act acknowledges a liability in the form of a debt or a duty. The maker of a bond is the "obligor." The party to whom it is made is the "obligee." The bond names the liability or indebtedness; then follows the condition wherein it is stated the particular thing that the obligor is to do, or not to do.
Still the fundamental principles of the stringent navigation laws long remained. All officers and three-fourths of the crew were required to be natives of the country of which the foreign vessel bore the flag, under penalty of confiscation of vessel and cargo, and a fine enforcible under pain of imprisonment. A tonnage tax was levied on foreign ships alone.
Justice Chase, indeed, even went so far as to suggest, as a sort of stop-gap to the breach they were thus creating in the Constitution, the idea that, even in the absence of written constitutional restrictions, the Social Compact as well as "the principles of our free republican governments" afforded judicially enforcible limitations upon legislative power in favor of private rights.
But, as discussion in the Convention proceeded, three principles obtained clearer and clearer recognition, if not from all its members, certainly from the great majority of them: first, that the Constitution is law, in the sense of being enforcible by courts; secondly, that it is supreme law, with which ordinary legislation must be in harmony to be valid; and thirdly a principle deducible from the doctrine of the separation of powers that, while the function of making new law belongs to the legislative branch of the Government, that of expounding the standing law, of which the Constitution would be part and parcel, belongs to the Judiciary.
All conduct, not immoral, admits, as already more than once intimated, of a tripartite division, into that which may be rightfully enforced; that of which, though it be not due nor rightfully enforcible, neglect deserves to be and may justly be punished by reproaches; that which is neither due nor reasonably to be looked for, but which involves a voluntary surrender for the good of others of some good which one might without reproach keep for oneself.
A system whereunder the colony has all rights and no enforcible duties, the mother-country all duties and no enforcible rights, obviously could not work. That was the system which, in the view of the gentlemen of England, the colonists were bent upon establishing; and, taking this view, they cannot be blamed for refusing to accept such a conclusion.
Political chicanery in Congress reinforced the clamor from without, and though act after act for the destruction of the traffic was passed, none proved to be enforcible in each was what the politicians of a later day called a "little joker," making it ineffective. But in 1820 a law was passed declaring slave-trading piracy, and punishable with death.
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