VIII

NATURAL RIGHTS AND POLITICAL

RIGHTS

[1890]

IN looking through a series of critical notices the other day, my eye was caught by a remark upon my essay "On the Natural Inequality of Men -to the effect that it was well enough; but why should I have taken all that trouble to slay the slain ?

Evidently, the propounder of the question believes that the doctrines of that school of political philosophers of which Rousseau was the typical representative, are not only killed but dead. But, whatever may hold good of men, doctrines do not necessarily die from being killed. Many a long year ago, I fondly imagined that Hume and Kant and Hamilton having slain the "Absolute," the thing must, in decency, decease. Yet, at the present time, the same hypostatised negation, sometimes thinly disguised under a new name,

goes about in broad daylight, in company with the dogmas of absolute ethics, political and other, and seems to be as lively as ever. It would seem to be to no purpose that the history of every branch of physical and historical science teems with examples of the fate which befalls the hasty generaliser who numbers, rather than weighs, supposed facts; and treats the rough approximations to truth obtained by the observation of highly complex phenomena as if they had the precision of geometrical theorems.

There is, unfortunately, abundant evidence that the vicious method of à priori political speculation which I have illustrated from the writings of Rousseau is not only in full vigour, but that it is exerting an influence upon the political action of our contemporaries which is extremely serious. No better evidence of the fact need be adduced than the avidity with which the writings of political teachers of this school have been and are being read, especially among the more intelligent of the working classes; and I doubt if any book published during the last ten years has obtained a larger circulation among them, not only in this country but in the United States, than "Progress and Poverty." The other day there was a rumour that some devoted disciple of its author, Mr. Henry George, had bequeathed a large sum of money to him in order to aid in the propagation of his doctrines.

In some respects, the work undoubtedly deserves the success which it has won. Clearly and vigorously written, though sometimes weakened by superfluous rhetorical confectionery, "Progress and Poverty" leaves the reader in no doubt as to Mr. George's meaning, and thus fulfils the primary condition of honest literature. Nor will any one question the author's intense conviction that the adoption of his panacea will cure the ills under which the modern state groans.

Mr. George's political philosophy is, in principle, though by no means in all its details, identical with Rousseauism. It exhibits, in perfection, the same à priori method, starting from highly questionable axioms which are assumed to represent absolute truth, and asking us to upset the existing arrangements of society on the faith of deductions from those axioms. The doctrine of "natural rights" is the fulcrum upon which he, like a good many other political philosophers, during the last 130 years, rests the lever wherewith the social world is to be lifted away from its present foundations and deposited upon others. In this respect, he is at one, not only with Rousseau and his conscious or unconscious followers in France and in England; but, I regret to say, may claim the countenance of a far more scientifically minded and practical school of political thinkers-that of the French Physiocrates of the eighteenth century.

The founder of this school, Quesnay, the saga

cious physician of Louis the Fifteenth, whom even that graceless prince appreciated and called his "thinker," was an eminently practical man, especially conversant with agriculture. As the name taken by his disciples implies, his teaching was, professedly, based upon careful observation of, and induction from, the course of nature, as it bears upon politics. It would hardly be too much to say that we owe to the Physiocrates the modern clearness of conviction that the world of human society is as much the theatre of order and definite sequence of cause and effect as the world of extrahuman nature; that there are rules of action, the observance of which brings about prosperity, while their neglect entails ruin, which have nothing to do with the laws of morality or with the ordinances of religion; and that the wicked who follow these rules will not beg their bread, while the pious who neglect them will. But Quesnay and his followers would have been more than mortal if they had escaped the influence of the spirit of their age; and though they never fell into the speculative monstrosities of Rousseau, yet, about the time that the latter was occupied with his essay on "Inequality," Quesnay composed that short work entitled "Le Droit Naturel," which is all too largely infected by the d priori method.

Quesnay begins by laying down the proposition that "Natural Right" may be "vaguely defined" as "the right which a man has to the things which

are fit for his enjoyment." Truly a vague enough definition, and one that would need a great deal more defining before it could be safely turned to any practical account. Quesnay's friend and collaborateur, Dupont de Nemours, in the introductory discourse prefixed to the collection entitled "Physiocratie: ou constitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain," published in 1768, has somewhat improved upon it. "Natural Right,” he says, is “the right a man has to do that which is to his advantage." He considers that this right is founded upon the condition that we are "charged with our own preservation under penalty of suffering and death." And he adds: "The final degree of punishment decreed by this sovereign law is superior to every other interest and to every arbitrary law." "Natural Right," then, is the right of a man to do anything necessary for his own preservation, and to possess himself of any means of enjoyment. It is possessed to its full and literal extent by any and every wholly isolated man. "Natural Right," by this account of it, must vest in the individual before he has entered into the social state, and must be antecedent to all forms of relative justice and injustice. But the contemporaneous and contiguous existence of many such individuals, all of whom assert their natural rights, must also necessarily end in the Hobbesian state of war of each against all, unless