quently can have
to confer, are privileges in respect of person or property other than
one's own. But such legalised privileges are not necessarily rights.
Whether they are so actually or not depends mainly on the character of
the legislative authority. A right to interfere with rights not based
upon law cannot be conferred without the consent of the parties in whom
the independent rights are vested, given either directly by themselves
or indirectly through their representatives. If a legislative body be
truly and thoroughly representative of the community which it controls,
then every one of its enactments, however bad or foolish, is virtually
an engagement to which every member of the community is a party, and any
privilege arising out of it becomes to all intents and purposes a right.
If, on the other hand, the legislative authority be autocratic, or if it
represent only certain favoured sections of the community, then none of
its enactments, however wise and good, of which a majority of the public
disapprove, and which interfere with the rights termed by Mr. Mill
'moral,' are morally binding, except on the legislators themselves and
their immediate constituents. Any one else may quite blamelessly break
the law, and resist any privilege thereby created, though he must, of
course, be prepared, in case of detection, to take the legal
consequences of his disobedience. For example, protective duties,
however impolitic, if imposed because a majority of the nation were of
opinion that a certain branch of domestic industry had better be
fostered by protection, could not be evaded without injustice to those
engaged in the protected industry, though there would be no injustice in
smuggling, if they had been imposed in opposition to the general sense
of the public by a packed Parliament or an absolute monarch. The same
legal monopoly, which in the one case could not be justly evaded, could
not in the other be justly enforced. A legal privilege, in short,
becomes a right only when a majority of those at whose expense it is to
be exercised, have formally consented either directly or indirectly to
its being exercised; and it then becomes a right solely because an
engagement has been entered into, in virtue of which, whatever is
requisite for its satisfaction has become due. Thus it appears that,
whatever legal rights are genuine, and are not at the same time 'moral'
rights also, resolve themselves into specimens of the right to
fu