Which sentence in the excerpt presents a counterargument? adapted excerpt from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David
Thoreau Thoreau wrote this influential essay in 1849 because he was disgusted with the US government’s refusal to end slavery and with its participation in the Mexican-American War. The practical reason why a majority are permitted to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, but because they are physically the strongest. Can there not be a government in which the majorities do not decide right and wrong, but conscience?— in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable1? Why has every man a conscience, then? It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation I have is to do at any time what I think right. How does it become a man to behave toward the American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also. All men recognize the right to resist the government when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of 1775. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports2, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. But when a sixth of the population of a nation are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army3, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is that fact, that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army. It is not a man’s duty to devote himself to the eradication of any wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him. But it is his duty, at least, to wash
All men recognize the right to resist the government when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of 1775.
