Any number of individuals large enough to
count a majority among themselves, indisposed to pay the
government taxes, or to perform the military service exacted,
might hold a convention, adopt a secession ordinance, and declare
themselves a free, independent, sovereign state, and bid defiance
to the tax-collector and the provost-marshall, and that, too,
without forfeiting their estates or changing their domicile.
Would the government employ military force to coerce them back to
their allegiance? By what right? Government is their agent,
their creature, and no man owes allegiance to his own agent, or
creature.
The compact could bind only temporarily, and could at any moment
be dissolved. Mr. Jefferson saw this, and very consistently
maintained that one generation has no power to bind another; and,
as if this was not enough, he asserted the right of revolution,
and gave it as his opinion that in every nation a revolution once
in every generation is desirable, that is, according to his
reckoning, once every nineteen years. The doctrine that one
generation has no power to bind its successor is not only a
logical conclusion from the theory that governments derive their
just powers from the consent of the governed, since a generation
cannot give its consent before it is born, but is very convenient
for a nation that has contracted a large national debt; yet,
perhaps, not so convenient to the public creditor, since the new
generation may take it into its head not to assume or discharge
the obligations of its predecessor, but to repudiate them.
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