368 NATURAL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS vin 



right or wrong, it is, at any rate, intelligible. 

 But I do not quite see how it is to be proved by 

 any one who disputes it. The statement that a 

 man is the exclusive possessor of himself, even in 

 the sense of bare ownership, is most assuredly not 

 known to be true by intuition as, for example, 

 the proposition that two straight lines will not 

 enclose a space is said to be. The whole ancient 

 Roman world would have cried out against it. 

 For them, a man's children, grown up or not, no 

 less than his slaves, were so far from being 

 exclusive possessors of themselves that their 

 father could dispose of them as he thought fit. 

 Nor, as far as I know, is there any part of the 

 modern world in which a legal " infant " has the 

 full ownership of himself and the absolute right 

 to the usufruct of his own powers. Again, to the 

 best of my knowledge, there is no country or 

 nation in which an adult man has, or ever had, in 

 any sense, the exclusive possession of himself. 

 On the contrary, the state invariably lays claim 

 to him for the discharge of various military or 

 civil offices, and to more or less of the fruits of 

 his exertions in the shape of rates and taxes for 

 the support of the machinery of external defence 

 and internal protection. In truth, as I have 

 already pointed out, the very existence of society 

 depends on the fact that every member of it 

 tacitly admits that he is not the exclusive 

 possessor of himself, and that lie admits the claim 



