Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1884 — Herbert Spencer on the Source of Rights. [ARTICLE]

Herbert Spencer on the Source of Rights.

Primitive peoples of various types show us that before governments exist, immemorial customs recognize private claims, and justify maintenance of them. Codes of law independently evolved by different nations agree in forbidding certain trespasses on the persons, properties, and liberties of citizens; and their correspondences imply, not an artificial source of individual rights, but a natural source. Along with social development, the formulating in law of the rights pre-established by custom becomes more definite and elaborate. At the same time, government undertakes to an increasing extent the business of enforcing them. While it has been becoming a better protector, government has been becom,mg less aggressive—has more and more diminished its intrusions on men’s spheres of private action. And, lastly, as in past times laws were avowedly modified to fit better with current ideas of equity, so now law reformers are guided by ideas of equity whiqh are noj; derived from law, but to which law has to conform. Here, then, we have a politioo-ethi-cal thqpry justified alike by analysis and by. history. What have we against it? A fashionable counter-theory Which proves to be unjustifiable. On the one hand, while we find that individual life and socjal Kfe both imply maintenance of the natural relation between efforts and benefits, we also find that this natural relation, recognized before government ex'sted, has been all along asserting and reasserting itself, and obtaining better recognition in codes of law and systems of ethics. On the other hand, those who. denying natural rights, commit themselves to the assertion that rights are artificially created by law, are not only flatly contradicted by facts, but their assertion is self-destructive; the endeavor to substantiate it, when challenged, involves them in manifold absurdities.—Popular Science Monthly. The convict at present carries an indelible brand. The law limits his punishment, but society males it life long. If he seeks work he must practice deception to secure it. If he tells the truth about himself he is ordered away. There is ample room here for the exercise of Christian precepts and principles. —Har ford Post. Prejudice is the yellow jaundice of judgment.