forego our own will or inclination in any case whatever, is
simply denying the right of all government, and falling into
no-governmentism. Liberty is violated only when we are required
to forego our own will or inclination by a power that has no
right to make the requisition; for we are bound to obedience as
far as authority has right to govern, and we can never have the
right to disobey a rightful command. The requisition, if made by
rightful authority, then, violates no right that we have or can
have, and where there is no violation of our rights there is no
violation of our liberty. The moral right of authority, which
involves the moral duty of obedience, presents, then, the ground
on which liberty and authority may meet in peace and operate to
the same end.

This has no resemblance to the slavish doctrine of passive
obedience, and that the resistance to power can never be lawful.
The tyrant may be lawfully resisted, for the tyrant, by force of
the word itself, is a usurper, and without authority. Abuses of
power may be resisted even by force when they become too great to
be endured, when there is no legal or regular way of redressing
them, and when there is a reasonable prospect that resistance
will prove effectual and substitute something better in their
place. But it is never lawful to resist the rightful sovereign,
for it can never be right to resist right, and the rightful
sovereign in the constitutional exercise of his power can never
be said to abuse it. Abuse is the unconstitutional or wrongful
exercise of a power rightfully held, and when it is not so
exercised there is no abuse or abuses to redress. All turns,
then, on the right of power, or its legitimacy. Whence does
government derive its right to govern? What is the origin and