NOTES 625 



born ; and that not all our fellows, or our enemies, or our 

 rulers, or any one else, can deprive us of it. But what proof 

 have we that we ever really received such an endowment ? . . . 

 And then we shall proceed to claim a right to work, say, or 

 to marry, or to acquire wealth, or to live in the sun. But 

 who gave us these rights, pray ? Show the title-deeds. You 

 cannot : then your claim is a pretence made in order to extract 

 something from your fellows 1 No, there is no such thing 

 as a right ; we have no rights ; we possess only such privileges 

 as nature and our fellow men choose to allow us. 



This word has been the curse of mankind from time im- 

 memorial ; for if we once admit a right to anything, we must 

 admit a right to everything ; and if for one, then for all — 

 and trouble follows. If there is a right to possession, the 

 right must be equal for all. A man who has a right to possess 

 a house has the right to possess as good a house as you have, 

 or as the king has : and then he is aggrieved if he does not 

 possess a palace, and sets to work to seize the king's house 

 by force. Such " rights " indeed constitute the whole text 

 of almost all mob-orators, demagogues, radicals, anarchists, 

 and the like ; and the logical sequences of their teaching are 

 the Russian Bolshevik and the horrors which he has inflicted 

 on his country. But these people are by no means the only 

 prophets of the false god. We have heard of the rights, even 

 of the divine rights, of kings ; and these are generally asso- 

 ciated with the rights of numerous deputy-kings ; but never 

 have we seen any proof, or indeed any evidence, of the reality 

 of such things. Lastly there are the rights of nations ; or 

 of classes, such as the " working classes " ; or even of persons 

 interspersed among a population but who hold different creeds 

 or believe themselves to belong to a different race to the rest 

 of the population — such as the Irishry in Ireland. All these 

 rights are very fine things ; and at present, during the Peace 

 Conference, we are being deluged with them, and with the 

 " aspirations " of numerous petty tribes which have generally 

 been failures in the world, but wish to obtain territories belong- 

 ing to more able nations. In fact observation suggests that, 

 with nations as with individuals, the possession of many 

 rights is almost always associated with the absence of the 

 qualities which give prosperity and also with the strong desire 

 to become more prosperous in the future without undue 



