"History is full of examples where, in contests for liberty, a jealousy of power has either defeated the attempts to recover or preserve it, in the first place, or has afterward subverted it by clogging government with too great precautions for its felicity, or by leaving too wide a door for sedition and popular licentiousness. In a government framed for durable liberty, not less regard must be paid to giving the magistrate a proper degree of authority to make and execute laws with rigor, than to guard against encroachments upon the rights of the community. As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy."

      Alexander Hamilton, THE CONTINENTALIST (July 12, 1781,
            & July 4, 1782).

"... a large and well-organized republic can scarcely lose its liberty from any other cause than that of anarchy, to which a contempt of the laws is the high road.

"... a sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government.

"Government is frequently and aptly classed under two descriptions--a government of force, and a government of laws; the first is the definition of despotism--the last, of liberty. But how can a government of laws exist when the laws are disrespected and disobeyed? Government supposes control. It is that power by which individuals in society are kept from doing injury to each other, and are brought to cooperate to a common end. The instruments by which it must act are either the authority of the laws or force. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of govern- ment, there is an end to liberty.

"Those, therefore, who preach doctrines, or set examples which subvert the authority of the laws, lead us from freedom to slavery, they incapacitate us for a government of laws, and consequently prepare the way for force, for mankind must have government of one sort or another. There are, indeed, great and urgent cases where the bounds of the Consti- tution are manifestly transgressed, or its constitutional authorities so exercised as to pro- duce unequivocal oppression on the community, and to render resistance justifiable. But such cases can give no color [of justitication or legitimacy] to the resistance by a compara- tively inconsiderable part of the community, of constitutional laws distinguished by no ex- traordinary features of rigor or oppression, and acquiesced in by the body of the communi- ty.

"Such a resistance is treason against society, against liberty, against every thing that ought to be dear to a free, enlightened, and prudent people. To tolerate it, were to abandon your most precious interests. Not to subdue it, were to tolerate it."

      Alexander Hamilton, Speech on the Whiskey Insurrection
            in Western Pennsylvania (1794).

"He who irresponsibly incites revolutionary mob emotions against some minor abuse within a good tradition, may bring the whole house crashing down on his head and find himself back in the jungle--or its ethical equivalent, the police-state. You weaken the aura of all good laws every time you break a bad one--or everytime you take a short cut around the 'due process' of a good one. The lynching of the guilty is a subtler but no less deadly blow to civilization than the lynching of the innocent."

      Peter Viereck, CONSERVATISM REVISITED (The Free Press,
            1962).

"When men take it in their heads today to hang gamblers or burn murderers, they should recollect that in the confusion usually attending such transactions they will be as likely to hang or burn someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is, and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of tomorrow may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals are trodden down and disregard- ed. But all this, even, is not the full extent of the evil. By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit are encouraged to be- come lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint but dread of punishment, they thus become absolutely unrestrained. Having ever regarded government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations, and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation. While, on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquillity, who desire to abide by the laws and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country, seeing their property destroyed, their families insulted, and their lives endangered, and seeing nothing in prospect that forbodes a change for the better, become tired and disgusted with a government that offers them no protec- tion, and not much averse to a change in which they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocratic spirit which all must admit is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed--I mean the attachment of the people. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of the population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on it, this government cannot last. By such things the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it, and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak to make their friendship effectual.

"... if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if ... [the] rights [of individuals] to be secure in their persons and property are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later it must come.

"... let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear up the charter of his own and his children's liberty.

"There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. In any case that may arise ... one of two positions is necessarily true--that is, the thing is right within itself, and there- fore deserves the protection of the law and all good citizens, or it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case is the interposition of mob law either necessary, justifiable, or excusable."

      Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, Springfield Illinois
            (1837).

"Laws never would be improved if there were not numerous persons whose moral senti- ments [values] are better than the existing laws."

      John Stuart Mill, "The Subjection of Women" (1869).