throughout on a recognition of men's claims considered as existing apart from legal warrant. And the changes of law now from time to time made after resistance, are similarly made in pursuance of current ideas concerning the requirements of justice; which, instead of being derived from the law are opposed to the law. For example, that recent Act which gives to a married woman a right of property in her own earnings, evidently originated in the consciousness that the natural connection between labor expended and benefit enjoyed, is one which should be maintained in all cases. The reformed law did not create the right, but recognition of the right created the reformed law.
Thus, historical evidences of five different kinds, unite in teaching that, confused as are the popular notions concerning rights, and including, as they do, much which should be excluded, yet they shadow forth a truth.
Let us now go on to consider the original source of this truth. In a previous paper I have spoken of the open secret, that there can be no social phenomena but what, if we analyze them to the bottom, bring us down to the laws of life; and that there can be no true understanding of them without reference to the laws of life. Let us now change the venue, and transfer this question of natural rights from the court of politics to the court of science—the science of life. The reader need feel no alarm; its simplest and most obvious facts will suffice. Let us contemplate first the general conditions to individual life; and then the general conditions to social life. We shall find that both yield the same verdict.
Animal life involves waste; waste must be met by repair; repair implies nutrition. Again, nutrition presupposes obtainment of food; food can not be got without powers of prehension, and, usually, of locomotion; and that these powers may achieve their ends, there must be freedom to move about. If you shut up a mammal in a small space, or tie its limbs together, or take from it the food it has procured, you eventually, by persistence in one or other of these courses, cause its death. Passing a certain point, hindrance to the fulfillment of these requirements is fatal. And all this, which holds of the higher animals at large, of course holds of man.
If we adopt pessimism as a creed, and with it accept the implication that life in general being an evil should be put an end to, then there is no ethical warrant for these actions by which life is maintained: the whole question drops. But if we adopt either the optimist view or the meliorist view—if we say that life on the whole brings more pleasure than pain; or that it is on the way to become such that it will yield more pleasure than pain; then these actions by which life is maintained are justified, and there results a warrant for the freedom to perform them. Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activi-
