WHY LARRY WAS READY FOR BATTLE

“Larry, you ought to be a major-general,” said Dick, with enthusiasm, as soon as the boatswain was well out of earshot. “I never saw anything better managed than that was. From the moment you put us behind the log, the fight—if there was to be a fight—was all ours.”

“Yes,” said Tom, “we’d have had no difficulty in cleaning those fellows out if it had come to that, and the boatswain saw it as clearly as we did. But I don’t yet understand why you did it, Larry.”

“Why, simply to make sure of success in self-defense. That seems simple enough,” responded Larry.

“Oh, yes, that’s simple enough, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I meant I don’t see why you made any objection to going aboard at first and telling the officers there all you’re going to tell them now. You are going of your own accord now; why didn’t you go when he wanted you to?”

“Because there was a principle at stake,” answered Larry, setting his teeth together as he recalled the controversy. “We are going aboard now of our own accord, as you say. That’s very different from going aboard as prisoners, under compulsion.”

“But I don’t see what difference it would have made when you knew the officers there would make guests instead of prisoners of us as soon as they heard what you had to say. It seems to me it would have come to the same thing in the end.”

“Not by a long shot,” answered Larry, speaking with particular earnestness. “Think a minute, Tom. We are free men, living under a free government that exists for the express purpose of securing liberty to all its people and protecting them in the enjoyment of that liberty. If one man, or one set of men, could arrest others without a warrant from a court, there would be no security for liberty and no liberty in fact. Whenever the people of any country are ready to submit to any infringement of their rights as free men, liberty in that country is dead, and tyranny is free to work its evil will. And in a free country it is the most sacred duty of every man to resist the smallest as well as the largest trespass upon his rights as a man. Usually he can do this by appealing to the courts of law, but in a case like ours to-night, where there is no possibility of making such an appeal, every man must be ready to fight for his rights—yes, to fight to the death for them if necessary.”

“But the matter was so small in this case—”

“What possible difference does that make? A principle is never small; liberty is always of supreme consequence, and it makes no difference how trifling the trespass upon one’s liberty is in itself, the duty to resist it at all costs and all hazards is just the same. Convenience and comfort do not count in any way. The difficulty is that men are not always ready to take trouble and endure inconvenience in defense of their rights where the matter in question seems to them of small moment. They forget that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,’ or if they remember it, they are too self-indulgent to undertake a troublesome resistance. It was not so that the men of the Revolutionary time looked at the matter. Webster said that the Americans ‘went to war against a preamble,’ and perhaps they did, but the preamble involved a fundamental principle. It was for the principle, not for the preamble, that they fought for seven long years. The colonists could easily have submitted to the impositions of a half crazy king and his tyrannical prime minister. It would have saved them a vast deal of inconvenience, expense and danger to do so. It would have been far more comfortable for them if they had done so. But if they had, this great, free nation of ours would never have existed, and the people in other civilized countries would not have enjoyed anything like the liberty they do now. In the same way it would have saved a lot of trouble if we had let those people arrest us to-night, but we had no right to submit to that. It was our duty to stand upon our rights and defend the principle by defending them.

“There! The lecture is over, and I promise not to let it happen again,” said Larry, by way of indirect apology for his seriousness.

“Well,” said Tom, “I for one am glad I heard the lecture as you call it. I needed it badly, for I had never thought of these things in that way. How did you come to have all that on the tip of your tongue, Larry?”

“I don’t know, or, yes I do. I was born and brought up on that gospel, and I have heard it preached all my life. My father has taught Cal and me from childhood that ‘the only legitimate function of government is to maintain the conditions of liberty,’ and that the highest duty of every citizen is to insist that the government under which he lives shall do precisely that. Now let’s talk of something else, or you fellows talk, rather, for I’ve talked more than my share already.”

“Before we do,” broke in Dick, “there’s just one thing I’d like to ask.”

“All right. Go ahead. Ask anything you please if it isn’t a conundrum.”

“Well, it isn’t a conundrum. It is only that I wonder how you know there isn’t some law authorizing the revenue officers to make arrests without warrants?”

“I know it simply because such a law is impossible.”

“How so?”

“Because there is no power on earth that can make such a law for this country.”

“Couldn’t Congress make it?”

“No. Congress has no more power to make it than a flock of crows has.”

“I don’t understand. If Congress should pass an act to that effect and the President should sign it, what then?”

“What then? Why just nothing at all. It wouldn’t be a law. It would have no more force or effect than the decree of a company of lunatics that the sun shall hereafter rise in the west and set in the east.”

“But why not?”

“Why, simply because Congress has no power to make any law that violates the Constitution. The Constitution expressly secures certain rights to every citizen. If Congress passes an act in violation of the Constitution, or even an act that the Constitution does not authorize it to pass, the courts refuse to enforce it or in any way to recognize it as a law. Now we’ve simply got to stop all this discussion, for I hear the revenue officers coming.”