350 NATURAL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS VIIT 



law of nature would bid the individual: "Do 

 what you will, so far as you can." But it is only 

 inexactly and by way of metaphor, that we c;m 

 speak of disobedience to a law of nature or of 

 penalties for such disobedience. If, by impos- 

 sibility, a tiger were to have an attack of the 

 philozoic and vegetarian fanaticism which is going 

 about, and to declare that he would neither kill, 

 nor eat flesh, any more, he would undoubtedly 

 undergo a lingering and painful death by starva- 

 tion. But there is neither disobedience nor penalty 

 here. The laws of nature are statements of ten- 

 dencies, and if one law expresses the truth, that 

 tigers which kill and eat will live and wax fat, 

 another expresses the converse truth, that if tigers 

 do not kill and eat, they will wax lean ami die. 

 The results are consequences of two modes of 

 action, both of which are in accordance with 

 natural law (or they could not occur) and not 

 rewards or penalties. Indeed, that they cannot 

 be the latter is clear from the further truth, that 

 the tiger who has grown old in doing his best to 

 fulfil the first "law of nature," as with age his 

 limbs grow stiff and his tusks wear down, falls, 

 very much against his will, under the second 

 "law" and dies as miserably of starvation as if 

 he had refused to kill and eat on the loftiest of 

 antivivisection and vegetarian principles. 



The crown of the differences between the " law 

 of nature" with its consequent "natural rights" 



