Therefore, according to Blackstone and Justinian, those laws have no binding force; and every American man-of-war's-man would be morally justified in resisting the scourge to the uttermost; and, in so resisting, would be religiously justified in what would be judicially styled "the act of mutiny" itself.
If, then, these scourging laws be for any reason necessary, make them binding upon all who of right come under their sway; and let us see an honest Commodore, duly authorised by Congress, condemning to the lash a transgressing Captain by the side of a transgressing sailor.

And if the Commodore himself prove a transgressor, let us see one of his brother Commodores take up the lash against _him_, even as the boatswain's mates, the navy executioners, are often called upon to scourge each other.
Or will you say that a navy officer is a man, but that an American-born citizen, whose grandsire may have ennobled him by pouring out his blood at Bunker Hill--will you say that, by entering the service of his country as a common seaman, and standing ready to fight her foes, he thereby loses his manhood at the very time he most asserts it?
Will you say that, by so doing, he degrades himself to the liability of the scourge, but if he tarries ashore in time of danger, he is safe from that indignity?
All our linked states, all four continents of mankind, unite in denouncing such a thought.
We plant the question, then, on the topmost argument of all.
Irrespective of incidental considerations, we assert that flogging in the navy is opposed to the essential dignity, of man, which no legislator has a right to violate; that it is oppressive, and glaringly unequal in its operations; that it is utterly repugnant to the spirit of our democratic institutions; indeed, that it involves a lingering trait of the worst times of a barbarous feudal aristocracy; in a word, we denounce it as religiously, morally, and immutably _wrong_.
No matter, then, what may be the consequences of its abolition; no matter if we have to dismantle our fleets, and our unprotected commerce should fall a prey to the spoiler, the awful admonitions of justice and humanity demand that abolition without procrastination; in a voice that is not to be mistaken, demand that abolition today.

It is not a dollar-and-cent question of expediency; it is a matter of _right and wrong_.

And if any man can lay his hand on his heart, and solemnly say that this scourging is right, let that man but once feel the lash on his own back, and in his agony you will hear the apostate call the seventh heavens to witness that it is _wrong_.

And, in the name of immortal manhood, would to God that every man who upholds this thing were scourged at the gangway till he recanted..