THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION: 303 



throughout on a recognition of men's claims considered as existing 

 apart from legal warrant. And the changes of law now from time to 

 time made after resistance, are similarly made in pursuance of current 

 ideas concerning the requirements of justice ; which, instead of being 

 derived from the law are opposed to the law. For example, that recent 

 Act which gives to a married woman a right of property in her own 

 earnings, evidently originated in the consciousness that the natural 

 connection between labor expended and benefit enjoyed, is one which 

 should be maintained in all cases. The reformed law did not create 

 the right, but recognition of the right created the reformed law. 



Thus, historical evidences of five different kinds, unite in teaching 

 that, confused as are the popular notions concerning rights, and includ- 

 ing, as they do, much which should be excluded, yet they shadow forth 

 a truth. 



Let us now go on to consider the original source of this truth. In 

 a previous paper I have spoken of the open secret, that there can be 

 no social phenomena but what, if we analyze them to the bottom, bring 

 us down to the laws of life ; and that there can be no true understand- 

 ing of them without reference to the laws of life. Let us now change 

 the venue, and transfer this question of natural rights from the court 

 of politics to the court of science — the science of life. The reader need 

 feel no alarm ; its simplest and most obvious facts will sufiice. Let us 

 contemplate first the general conditions to individual life ; and then 

 the general conditions to social life. We shall find that both yield the 

 same verdict. 



Animal life involves waste ; waste must be met by repair ; repair 

 implies nutrition. Again, nutrition presupposes obtainment of food ; 

 food can not be got without powers of prehension, and, usually, of loco- 

 motion ; and that these powers may achieve their ends, there must be 

 freedom to move about. If you shut up a mammal in a small space, or 

 tie its limbs together, or take from it the food it has procured, you 

 eventually, by persistence in one or other of these courses, cause its 

 death. Passing a certain point, hindrance to the fulfillment of these 

 requirements is fatal. And all this, which holds of the higher animals 

 at large, of course holds of man. 



If we adopt pessimism as a creed, and with it accept the implication 

 that life in general being an evil should be put an end to, then there is 

 no ethical warrant for these actions by which life is maintained : the 

 whole question drops. But if we adoj^t either the optimist view or the 

 meliorist view — if we say that life on the whole brings more pleasure 

 than pain ; or that it is on the way to become such that it will yield 

 more pleasure than pain ; then these actions by which life is maintained 

 are justified, and there results a warrant for the freedom to perfonn 

 them. Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that 

 men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activi- 



