Justice & Law Quote by Caleb Cushing

A velvet-gloved threat dressed up as constitutional etiquette, Cushing’s line draws a bright boundary and dares the listener to cross it. “Great natural rights” is doing double duty: it reaches past statutes into the older, almost sacred language of rights that supposedly pre-exist government. That move matters because it shifts the debate from policy to legitimacy. If rights are “natural,” then any official who “tampers” with them isn’t merely wrong; he’s usurping something he was never entitled to touch.

The syntax is a study in controlled refusal. “We keep to ourselves” asserts ownership. “We will not have them tampered with” escalates into a warning, the passive construction slyly implying an aggressor. Then comes the kill shot: “we give to you no commission whatsoever.” In other words, even if you hold office, your authority stops at the edge of our rights. It’s a compact way of saying: you may govern, but you don’t get to re-negotiate the terms of personhood.

Contextually, this is the rhetoric of a young republic still allergic to centralized power, and of a 19th-century political class that routinely invoked “rights” as a shield against federal reach. As a diplomat and statesman, Cushing also understood the power of jurisdictional language. “Commission” is bureaucratic vocabulary repurposed as a moral veto: sovereignty resides with the people, and government is a delegated instrument, not an overlord.

The subtext is less serene than it sounds. By staking rights as private property, the sentence can function as a liberty hymn or as a barricade against reform, depending on who gets counted in “we.” That ambiguity is the quote’s most revealing feature.