"NO TREASON" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spooner Lysander)

and acceptable to their posterity; that it might promote their union, safety,
tranquility, and welfare; and that it might tend "to secure to them the
blessings of liberty." The language does not assert nor at all imply,
any right, power, or disposition, on the part of the original parties to
the agreement, to compel their "posterity" to live under it. If they had
intended to bind their posterity to live under it, they should have said
that their objective was, not "to secure to them the blessings of liberty,"
but to make slaves of them; for if their "posterity" are bound to live under
it, they are nothing less than the slaves of their foolish, tyrannical,
and dead grandfathers.

It cannot be said that the Constitution formed "the people of the United
States," for all time, into a corporation. It does not speak of "the
people" as a corporation, but as individuals. A corporation does not
describe itself as "we," nor as "people," nor as "ourselves." Nor does a
corporation, in legal language, have any "posterity." It supposes itself
to have, and speaks of itself as having, perpetual existence, as a single
individuality.

Moreover, no body of men, existing at any one time, have the power to
create a perpetual corporation. A corporation can become practically
perpetual only by the voluntary accession of new members, as the old ones
die off. But for this voluntary accession of new members, the corporation
necessarily dies with the death of those who originally composed it.

Legally speaking, therefore, there is, in the Constitution, nothing that
professes or attempts to bind the "posterity" of those who established it.

If, then, those who established the Constitution, had no power to bind, and
did not attempt to bind, their posterity, the question arises, whether
their posterity have bound themselves. If they have done so, they can
have done so in only one or both of these two ways, viz., by voting, and
paying taxes.


II.

Let us consider these two matters, voting and tax paying, separately. And
first of voting.

All the voting that has ever taken place under the Constitution, has been
of such a kind that it not only did not pledge the whole people to support
the Constitution, but it did not even pledge any one of them to do so, as
the following considerations show.

1. In the very nature of things, the act of voting could bind nobody but
the actual voters. But owing to the property qualifications required,
it is probable that, during the first twenty or thirty years under the
Constitution, not more than one-tenth, fifteenth, or perhaps twentieth of
the whole population (black and white, men, women, and minors) were