THE GREAT POLITICAL SUPERSTITION, 309 



whichever of two senses conceived, depends on maintenance of indi- 

 vidual rights. If it is nothing more than the sum of the lives of citi- 

 zens, this implication is obvious. If it consists of those many unlike 

 activities which citizens carry on in mutual dependence, still this 

 aggregate impersonal life rises or falls according as the rights of indi- 

 viduals are enforced or denied. 



Study of men's politico-ethical ideas and sentiment, leads to allied 

 conclusions. Primitive peoples of various types show us that before 

 governments exist, immemorial customs recognize private claims and 

 justify maintenance of them. Codes of law independently evolved by 

 different nations, agree in forbidding certain trespasses on the persons, 

 properties, and liberties of citizens ; and their correspondences imply, 

 not an artificial source for individual rights, but a natural source. 

 Along with social development, the formulating in law of the rights 

 pre-established by custom, becomes more definite and elaborate. At 

 the same time. Government undertakes to an increasing extent the 

 business of enforcing them. While it has been becoming a better pro- 

 tector. Government has been becoming less aggressive — has more and 

 more diminished its intrusions on men's spheres of private action. 

 And, lastly, as in past times laws were avowedly modified to fit bet- 

 ter with current ideas of equity, so now, law-reformers are guided by 

 ideas of equity which are not derived from law but to which law has 

 to conform. 



Here, then, we have a politico-ethical theory justified alike by 

 analysis and by history. What have we against it ? A fashionable 

 counter-theory which proves to be unjustifiable. On the one hand, 

 while we find that individual life and social life both imply mainte- 

 nance of the natural relation between efforts and benefits ; we also 

 find that this natural relation, recognized before Government existed, 

 has been all along asserting and reasserting itself, and obtaining better 

 recognition in codes of law and systems of ethics. On the other hand, 

 those who, denying natural rights, commit themselves to the assertion 

 that rights are artificially created by law, are not only flatly contra- 

 dicted by facts, but their assertion is self-destructive : the endeavor 

 to substantiate it, when challenged, involves them in manifold ab- 

 surdities. 



Nor is this all. The reinstitution of a vague, popular conception 

 in a definite form on a scientific basis, leads us to a rational view of 

 the relation between the wills of majorities and minorities. It turns 

 out that those co-operations in which all can voluntarily unite, and in 

 the carrying on of which the will of the majority is rightly supreme, 

 are co-operations for maintaining the conditions requisite to indi- 

 vidual and social life. Defense of the society as a whole against 

 external invaders, has for its remote end to preserve each citizen in 

 possession of such means as he has for satisfying his desires, and in 

 possession of such liberty as he has for getting further means. And 



