The political, effects produced by this paper, however, were much the most material part of its results.  Whenever it offended and disgusted its readers by its dishonesty, selfishness, vulgarity, and lies—­and it did this every week, being a hebdomadal—­it recovered the ground it had lost by beginning to talk of ‘the people’ and their rights.  This the colonists could not withstand.  All their sympathies were enlisted in behalf of him who thought so much of their rights; and, at the very moment he was trampling on these rights, to advance his own personal views, and even treating them with contempt by uttering the trash he did, they imagined that he and his paper in particular, and its doctrines in general, were a sort of gift from Heaven to form the palladium of their precious liberties!

The great theory advanced by this editorial tyro, was, that a majority of any community had a right to do as it pleased.  The governor early saw, not only the fallacies, but the danger of this doctrine; and he wrote several communications himself, in order to prove that it was false.  If true, he contended it was true altogether; and that it must be taken, if taken as an axiom at all, with its largest consequences.  Now, if a majority has a right to rule, in this arbitrary manner, it has a right to set its dogmas above the commandments, and to legalize theft, murder, adultery, and all the other sins denounced in the twentieth chapter of Exodus.  This was a poser to the demagogue, but he made an effort to get rid of it, by excepting the laws of God, which he allowed that even majorities were bound to respect.  Thereupon, the governor replied that the laws of God were nothing but the great principles which ought to govern human conduct, and that his concession was an avowal that there was a power to which majorities should defer.  Now, this was just as true of minorities as it was of majorities, and the amount of it all was that men, in establishing governments, merely set up a standard of principles which they pledged themselves to respect; and that, even in the most democratical communities, all that majorities could legally effect was to decide certain minor questions which, being necessarily referred to some tribunal for decision, was of preference referred to them.  If there was a power superior to the will of the majority, in the management of human affairs, then majorities were not supreme; and it behooved the citizen to regard the last as only what they really are, and what they were probably designed to be—­tribunals subject to the control of certain just principles.

Constitutions, or the fundamental law, the governor went on to say, were meant to be the expression of those just and general principles which should control human society, and as such should prevail over majorities.  Constitutions were expressly intended to defend the rights of minorities; since without them, each question, or interest, might be settled by the majority, as it arose.  It was but a truism to say that the oppression of the majority was the worst sort of oppression; since the parties injured not only endured the burthen imposed by many, but were cut off from the sympathy of their kind, which can alleviate much suffering, by the inherent character of the tyranny.