has equal validity with other rights. As a partial equivalent for these aids Mr. Spencer demands obedience from children to parents.
The division just summarized, while showing the same dialectical skill and ability as met us in the chapters devoted to Justice, is enriched by a wealth of sociological and historical facts which Mr. Spencer marshals with his usual felicity as inductive verification of his deductive argument. The final division of the volume, which deals with a living issue in politics, is everywhere instinct with the earnestness of assured conviction on a great subject, and for this reason, perhaps, its tone is occasionally somewhat controversial and its arguments here and there a little too personal.
This part opens with a chapter on "Political Rights — so called." There is good reason for the qualifying epithet. Mr. Spencer holds "there are no further rights, truly so called, than such as have been set forth" (p. 176) in the paragraph preceding the last. Government is merely instrumental to the maintenance of these rights, and the franchise is a method of creating government. In the first stage of its development the state has mainly to do with the protection of its members from death and injury by external foes, in the last stage its main if not entire function is to prevent internal trespasses. It cannot discharge this duty if its legislators are under the influence of classes, be they nobles, capitalists, or laborers. Hence the modern industrial state should be so constituted as to have "not a representation of individuals but a representation of interests" (p. 192). In accordance with this conclusion, Mr. Spencer deprecates the "one man, one vote" theory, with the socialistic class-legislation to which it is now leading. Everywhere throughout the work he is the uncompromising opponent of socialism; and the closing chapters have a massive argument, appealing both to reason and to experience, to show that it is a violation alike of justice and of good policy, for the state to undertake any other duties except those of protecting its citizens from external foes and from internal transgressors. For the better performance of the latter it is suggested that the state "should administer justice without cost, in civil as well as in criminal cases" (p. 211).
It is not easy, in the absence of the still unpublished part of Mr. Spencer's ethical philosophy, to make a correct estimate of the part that has just been given to the public. It seems not unlikely that his subsequent theory of positive and negative beneficence will lead to modifications in the present abstract doctrine of Justice, Rights, and Government. As, however, he has seen fit to publish the latter independently, our criticism need not go beyond its actual contents.
The peculiarity of Mr. Spencer's ethical system is the claim to have found in biological requirements the ultimate justification of morality. Whether in general this amounts to more than the truism that, in order
