intellect for gain at the will of another, and, so far as that is possible, wholly give it up to his control, provided that control does not interfere with the attainment by the moral nature of its end, will, I suppose, be conceded. Why not? The intellect is simply instrumental, and may be employed by the executive power in any way that shall not contravene a moral end. Of the rights that originate from the desires, as that of property, I need not speak, as it is conceded that they are alienable.

All inalienable rights may be included in those of life and liberty. A right to the pursuit of happiness, mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, would be included in that to liberty, since no man can have liberty who is debarred from the pursuit of that. And yet liberty is not wholly inalienable. In some respects, and to some extent, a man may part with his liberty, and it has not always been easy to say how far he may go in this, According to the principles already stated he may part with his liberty in any respect, and up to any point, that shall not interfere with the attainment of his highest end. Beyond this he can make no contract that would not be unlawful, and so not binding; for man has a paramount duty to God respecting himself, which is as fully binding as any other duty. He may never lawfully do anything with himself which shall prevent the great purpose that God had in view in giving him being from being accomplished. Except as an indispensable condition for a higher end, there is nothing sacred about liberty; it is capable of being wholly abused, and if it may be conceived that a higher end may be promoted by giving it up, then may it be given up. According to this those Moravian missionaries who sold themselves into slavery that

they might preach the gospel to the slaves, may have been justifiable. They sacrificed liberty for a higher end.

Inalienable rights are those of which a man cannot divest himself by contract; which he may not, under any circumstances, lawfully demit; but he may forfeit them by crime, and be wrongfully deprived of them by others. It is in this last case, in the violation of an inalienable right, that the greatest wrong is committed, and of this we see the reason in what has been said respecting the ground of inalienable rights. To deprive a man of life is everywhere regarded as the highest crime; and next to that, in some circumstances perhaps even greater, is the crime of depriving him of his liberty. When this is so done as to degrade a human being, and to come between him and his highest end, we have a crime that involves in it the essence of all crimes.

Of slavery, so far as it interferes with inalienable rights, our abhorrence cannot be too strong. It interferes with other rights, as those of the desires. It takes property, or the labor that makes property, without an adequate compensation. It violates the rights of the affections. It separates husbands and wives, and parents and children; putting, in the eyes of the law, and often practically, and by the necessities of the system, the natural affections of the slave on the same level with a brute instinct. It interferes with the rights of the intellect. It keeps men in ignorance, and prohibits them from learning to read the word of God. It gives the slave no security for anything. Everything must depend upon the will of the master; and if that will be reasonable, then upon his life. Now, while it is true, as has been said, that no man can be so placed that he cannot adhere to the right, yet such a system, applied to masses of human beings, must degrade them,

must come between them and their highest good, and so touch inalienable rights. The highest right of a man is his right to himself, and any right of property that would so contravene this that man shall be treated in any way as a brute, or degraded, and that would come between him and his end as designed by God, is impossible. No man can give it; the man himself cannot; no state can give it, and any attempt to hold such property is sin per se.

That there may be a temporary and modified system of involuntary servitude without infringing upon inalienable rights, and with ultimate benefit to those so held; that under a system of perpetual servitude the actual guilt will depend much on the light of the master, and the spirit in which it is administered; and that, under peculiar circumstances, the legal relation of master may be sustained for the good of the slave, not only without guilt, but meritoriously, may be conceded. And it is because this partial alienation of liberty without degradation is possible; and because guilt is so modified by acquiescence in established customs to which men have been used from their infancy, and which they have been taught are right; and because, from obstacles to emancipation through wicked laws and the disabilities they lay upon the freed-man, or from the helplessness of infancy or of old age, the legal relation of master may sometimes be rightly held while yet the system itself is one of utter oppression and wrong, often and generally infringing upon inalienable rights; and because of the immense pecuniary interests at stake, that it is possible for men to hold such discordant views on this subject, and that their views are held in connection with feelings so intense.

Having thus seen what is the origin of rights, and the distinction between those that are alienable and those that

RIGHTS OF THINGS AND OF PERSONS.

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are inalienable, we turn to another distinction. There are rights which have it for their object to guard the individual against the encroachments of others. As thus used, the sole correlative of rights is obligation, and it is in this aspect that rights are more generally treated. If I have a right to a piece of property, all others are under obligation to abstain from its use. The object of such rights is so to protect the individual in his freedom, that he may accomplish the ends indicated by his active powers. Such rights respect things, and not persons; or, if they respect persons, it is only as they are so related to us that we may by them accomplish our own ends.

But there are also rights over persons. The object of these is to enable those in whom they are vested to aid others in the accomplishment of their ends. Here the correlative of rights is still obligation. If the parent has a right over the child, the child is under obligation to respect that right. But here the right involves by necessity not only an obligation on the part of others, but also a duty on the part of him in whom the right is vested, and this duty thus necessarily involved in the right, and measured by it, may also properly be called its correlative. The foundation of the right here and in the other case is radically the same, as they both have reference to the attainment of an end; and yet there is an essential difference. In the first case the ground of the right is the necessity of that to which the individual has a right in order to the attainment by himself of his own ends, that is, of those indicated by his various active powers. But in the relations of society human beings are not always capable of attaining these ends without aid from others. In that case others may have rights, over them, natural or acquired; but the ground and measure of those rights will

be found in the necessity there is for aid in the accomplishment of those ends, and in the power and duty of those who possess the rights to render that aid.

In what has now been said we have a clear distinction between rights over things and those over persons. This distinction was indicated by Blackstone, under the heads "Rights of Things" and "Rights of Persons," but his statement of any ground for it is so indistinct that in a note to Chitty's edition of his work it is said that "the distinction of rights of persons and rights of things in the first two books of the Commentaries seems to have no other difference than the antithesis of the expression." As the most he could make of it, the annotator adds, "The distinction intended by the learned judge in the first two books appears to be in a great degree that of the rights of persons in public stations, and the rights of persons in private stations." This is wholly aside from the real ground of the distinction. As has been said, rights over persons have respect to the accomplishment of ends by those persons, and involve duties; while rights over things respect the accomplishment of ends by ourselves, and do not in the same way involve duties.

This distinction is needed because the rights over persons are numerous and important, and without it we have no way of fixing precisely the ground and limits of those rights. These are the rights of parents, of guardians, of teachers, so far as they have also guidance and control; they are, in general, the rights of those that govern; and have, standing over against them, not only corresponding obligations, but also corresponding rights. Wherever there is a right to govern, there is a corresponding right to be governed rightly. What it is to be governed rightly is implied in what has already been said. A man ought to