"On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thoreau Henry David)

to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself
partially to them in pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.

How does it become a man to behave toward the American
government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace
be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize
that political organization as my government which is the
slave's government also.

All men recognize the right of revolution; that is,
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist,
the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are
great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not
the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the
Revolution of '75. If one were to tell me that this was a
bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities
brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should
not make an ado about it, for I can do without them.
All machines have their friction; and possibly this does
enough good to counter-balance the evil. At any rate, it is
a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction
comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are
organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.
In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation
which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves,
and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a
foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it
is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.
What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact that the
country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions,
in his chapter on the "Duty of Submission to Civil
Government," resolves all civil obligation into expediency;
and he proceeds to say that "so long as the interest of the
whole society requires it, that it, so long as the established
government cannot be resisted or changed without public
inconveniencey, it is the will of God. . .that the
established government be obeyed--and no longer. This
principle being admitted, the justice of every particular
case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the
quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of
the probability and expense of redressing it on the other."
Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself.
But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases
to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which
a people, as well and an individual, must do justice, cost
what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a
drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.
This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient.