LIBERTY is more than a political question. To discuss the advisability of granting or withholding liberty from any people, is to question the advisability of recognizing individual rights. And this, in the United States, is to question the advisability of maintaining or repudiating the Declaration of Independence and the national Constitution. But these cannot be repudiated without a political revolution.
All political parties have upheld the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. When the Southern States repudiated the latter document by maintaining the doctrine of negro slavery, it meant not a contest of politics, but a repudiation of the Government itself.
Political contests are settled every few years, quietly, at the polls. But this question of liberty or slavery was settled by four years of terrible war.
Yet to-day there are many people, and readers of the AMERICAN SENTINEL at that, who see nothing more than a question of politics in the policy of foreign conquest upon which the American Government has entered.
The denial of liberty to any people is a denial of the American doctrine of inalienable rights; and a denial of this includes a denial of the individual rights of conscience; and a denial of these rights is a denial of the right to observe a Sabbath day in accordance with the dictates of conscience—to observe the seventh day according to the commandment of God, in opposition to first-day observance by the commandment of men.
Do you see anything more than mere politics in that? We do.