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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist
with wrong-doing. He well deserves to be called, as he has
been called, the Defender of the Constitution. There are
really no blows to be given him but defensive ones. He is
not a leader, but a follower. His leaders are the men of
'87. "I have never made an effort," he says, "and never
propose to make an effort; I have never countenanced an
effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to disturb
the arrangement as originally made, by which various States
came into the Union." Still thinking of the sanction which
the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, "Because it was
 On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |