Law History

This comprehensive history traces the quest for a peaceable and lawful revolution, from Britain's Glorious Revolution to Canada's current situation, with a special emphasis on the constitutional questions raised by the American Civil War.

The fact that there is no modern or even ancient accessible work on the nature and powers of constitutional conventions, has led me to attempt to fill the gap with the present book, which represents no preconceived theory, but rather merely an impartial collection of all the available law and precedent.

Variously a parish helper to the London poor and a successful New Zealand sheep farmer, Samuel Butler did not treasure the attitudes of his time (the second half of the 19th century). His books were iconoclastic in their attitudes towards Victorian ideals and The Way of All Flesh is foremost among them. It is appropriate, then, that it was published after his death and Queen Victoria's, in 1903.

THE WRONGS OF WOMAN, like the wrongs of the oppressed part of mankind, may be deemed necessary by their oppressors: but surely there are a few, who will dare to advance before the improvement of the age, and grant that my sketches are not the abortion of a distempered fancy, or the strong delineations of a wounded heart.

"There is no difficulty in showing that the ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the community; every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on to take an active part in the government, by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general."

These are such moral qualities as, when a man does not possess them, he is not bound to acquire them. They are: the moral feeling, conscience, love of one's neighbour, and respect for ourselves (self-esteem). There is no obligation to have these, since they are subjective conditions of susceptibility for the notion of duty, not objective conditions of morality.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercises thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the rights of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.