They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life, and to consolation in death. They have a right to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful. Men have a right to live by that rule they have a right to do justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupation. It is an institution of beneficence and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule.
If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics.įar am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold) the real rights of men. They are always at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse, but a question of competency and a question of title. The objections of these speculatists, if its forms do not quadrate with their theories, are as valid against such an old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny or the greenest usurpation. They have "the rights of men." Against these there can be no prescription against these no argument is binding: these admit no temperament, and no compromise: any thing withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice.Īgainst these rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration. They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men and as for the rest, they have wrought under-ground a mine that will blow up at one grand explosion all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. Whilst they are possessed by these notions, it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a constitution, whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience, and an increasing public strength and national prosperity. It is no wonder therefore, that with these ideas of every thing in their constitution and government at home, either in church or state, as illegitimate and usurped, or at best as a vain mockery, they look abroad with an eager and passionate enthusiasm.
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