Lysander Spooner Quotes
No principle, that is possible to be named, can be more self-evidently false than this; or more self-evidently fatal to all political freedom. Yet it triumphed in the field, and is now assumed to be established. If it really be established, the number of slaves, instead of having been diminished by the war, has been greatly increased; for a man, thus subjected to a government that he does not want, is a slave.
Spooner, Lysander. No Treason No. I. Published by the Author, 1867, p. 4.
Describing the proposed U. S. Constitution:
Hopkins was complaining about the fact that England could tax the colonies and thereby take their property without their consent made the American colonists in the “miserable condition of slaves.” Essentially the fundamental complaint of the Americans was this and in a decade it would erupt as the American Revolution. At the same time, Hopkins was a slave owner and yet saw nothing wrong with that.
The British saw the American colonies and the East Coast Canadian provinces all as their North American possessions. With the growing dissatisfaction of the New England and other Colonies, the British wanted to secure Quebec as a safe base where there were few rebels. Fox, of the opposition, criticized the heavy-handed control of Quebec wanting to give the rights of Englishmen under the English Constitution to all citizens of the North American colonies. Had Britain done so, there may never have been an American Revolution.
Lysander Spooner was an American individualist anarchist. He was also an abolitionist, entrepreneur, essayist, legal theorist, pamphletist, political philosopher, Unitarian, writer and a member of the First International.
