by the
National Assembly and afterwards made the first two articles of the
Constitution of 1791, viz., "Art. 1. Men are born and remain free and
equal in rights. Social distinctions can be based only upon public
utility. Art. 2. The aim of every political association is the
preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These
rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression."

Thus in the latter part of the 18th century the doctrine that man has
some individual rights by nature, not by grant or prescription, and
not alienable, obtained official recognition in two great nations. It
has since been formally and officially iterated in the Constitutions
of many American States and has been proclaimed and invoked as an
impregnably established political truth. Nevertheless the doctrine is
only a theory, not yet demonstrated nor undoubted. It has been
assailed and in the opinion of many refuted, by Bentham, Mill, and
other utilitarian writers, the successors of Epicurus, Carneades and
the Sophists. Even in France and America it is now repudiated by many
and declared to be an obstacle to social and political improvement.
Still, despite the vigorous arguments against the doctrine, there
remains the innate feeling and a general belief that society abridges
individual rights instead of conferring them. In support of this
notion may be cited the fact that the statutes of any state or nation
are almost wholly restrictive or compulsory in character, and rarely,
if ever, permissive. From the Decalogue down, the language of the law
has been compulsive, "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not"; and men
generally act upon the theory that what society does not forbid by
statute or custom the individual may do.

In passing now from the region of theory, of speculative opinion, to
what seems to me the region of facts, of actual conditions, of actual
traits of human nature, I wish it to be understood distinctly that in
what I may say about rights I am considering only the precepts of
justice, and that I differentiate those precepts from the precepts
of religion, charity, philanthropy, benevolence, and other similar
virtues, and even those of what is loosely called humanity. If it be
true as asserted by Addison that justice is the greatest and most
godlike of the virtues, it does not follow that the just man, to be
just, must possess all or any of the other virtues. One can be just
without being religious, charita