tive law of the states of the European continent.
Until it appeared public law literature recognized the rights of heads
of states, the privileges of class, and the privileges of individuals or
special corporations, but the general rights of subjects were to be
found essentially only in the form of duties on the part of the state,
not in the form of definite legal claims of the individual. The
Declaration of the Rights of Man for the first time originated in all
its vigor in positive law the conception, which until then had been
known only to natural law, of the personal rights of the members of the
state over against the state as a whole. This was next seen in the first
French constitution of September 3, 1791, which set forth, upon the
basis of a preceding declaration of rights, a list of _droits naturels
et civils_ as rights that were guaranteed by the constitution.[2]
Together with the right of suffrage, the "_droits garantis par la
constitution_", which were enumerated for the last time in the
constitution of November 4, 1848,[3] form to-day the basis of French
theory and practice respecting the personal public rights of the
individual.[4] And under the influence of the French declaration there
have been introduced into almost all of the constitutions of the other
Continental states similar enumerations of rights, whose separate
phrases and formulas, however, are more or less adapted to the
particular conditions of their respective states, and therefore
frequently exhibit wide differences in content.

In Germany most of the constitutions of the period prior to 1848
contained a section upon the rights of subjects, and in the year 1848
the National Constitutional Convention at Frankfort adopted "the
fundamental rights of the German people", which were published on
December 27, 1848, as Federal law. In spite of a resolution of the
_Bund_ of August 23, 1851, declaring these rights null and void, they
are of lasting importance, because many of their specifications are
to-day incorporated almost word for word in the existing Federal law.[5]
These enumerations of rights appear in greater numbers in the European
constitutions of the period after 1848. Thus, first of all, in the
Prussian constitution of January 31, 1850, and in Austria's "Fundamental
Law of the State" of December 21, 1867, on the general rights of the
state's citizens. And more recently they have been incorporated in the
constitutions of the new states in t