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, charitable, or philanthropic, and even without earning the reputation of being humane.
I wish further to premise that I am considering our subject only with reference to those who have grown to the age of self-maintenance and consequent freedom. I do not take into account the rights of children under that age.
With these premises borne in mind, I would now in the next chapter call attention to some propositions of fact, which I shall assume to be established by science and history and by the reader's own experience and observation, and which I think bear more or less directly on our subject.
CHAPTER III
THE PROBLEM OF RIGHTS CONTINUED. THE NEED OF LIBERTY OF ACTION FOR THE INDIVIDUAL
Men are endowed by nature with sundry powers, faculties, capacities, physical and mental. These, however, are not at all uniform, but are diverse in kind and degree in different races of men and in different individuals of the same race. Nature seems to work through diversity rather than through uniformity, indeed through inequality rather than through equality. Not all men are born poets, nor are all poets equally good poets. Not all men are by nature adapted for intellectual pursuits, and those who are so adapted are not in that respect equally favored by nature. Even in the field of the simplest manual labor there is great diversity of natural capacity. It seems to be nature's theory that mankind, the human race as a whole, will be better served by diversities, by differences in kinds and degrees of powers, than by uniformity and equality.
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