¶ Government on the old system is an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new, a delegation of power, for the common benefit of society.

¶ Instead of referring to musty records and moldy parchments to prove that the rights of the living are lost, "renounced and abdicated forever," by those who are now no more, M. De Lafayette applies to the living world and emphatically says, "Call to mind the sentiments which Nature has engraved in the heart of every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognized by all; For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it."

T

HE error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of a hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all.

¶ If we travel still further into antiquity, we shall find a directly contrary opinion and practice prevailing and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other; but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher can not be given him.

¶ We have now arrived at the origin of man and at the

origin of his rights. As to the manner in which the world has been governed from that day to this, it is no further any concern of ours than to make a proper use of the errors or the improvements which the history of it presents. Those who lived a hundred or a thousand years ago were then moderns as we are now. They had their ancients, and those ancients had others, and we also shall be ancients in our turn Ꮽe Ꮽ

¶ If the mere name of antiquity is to govern in the affairs of life, the people who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence may as well take us for a precedent, as we make a precedent of those who lived a hundred or a thousand years ago. The fact is, that portions of antiquity, by proving everything, establish nothing. It is authority against authority all the way, till we come to the divine origin of the rights of man, at the Creation. Here our inquiries find a resting-place, and our reason finds a home.

¶ If a dispute about the rights of man had arisen at a distance of a hundred years from the Creation, it is to this source of authority they must have referred, and it is to the same source of authority that we must now refer. ¶ Though I mean not to touch upon any sectarian principle of religion, yet it may be worth observing that the genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam. Why, then, not trace the rights of man to the creation of man? I will answer the question. Because there have been upstart governments, thrusting themselves between, and presumptuously working to unmake man.

¶ If any generation of men ever possessed the right of dictating the mode by which they should be governed forever, it was the first generation that existed; and if that

generation did it not, no succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it nor can set any up.

¶ The illuminating and divine principle of the equal rights of man (for it has its origin from the Maker of man) relates not only to the living individuals, but to generations of men succeeding each other. Every generation is equal in rights to the generation which preceded it, by the same rule that every individual is born equal in rights with his contemporary 90

¶ It is also to be observed that all the religions known in the world are founded, so far as they relate to man, on the unity of man, as being all of one degree. Whether in Heaven or in Hell, or in whatever state man may be supposed to exist hereafter, the good and the bad are the only distinctions. Nay, even the laws of government are obliged to slide into this principle, by making degrees to consist in crimes, and not in persons.

¶ It is one of the greatest of all truths, and of the highest advantage to cultivate. By considering man in this light, and by instructing him to consider himself in this light, it places him in close connection with all duties, whether to his Creator or to the Creation, of which he is a part; and it is only when he forgets his origin, or, to use a more fashionable phrase, his birth and family, that he becomes dissolute O

¶ It is not among the least of the evils of the present existing governments in all parts of Europe, that man, considered as man, is thrown back to a vast distance from his Maker, and the artificial chasm filled up by a succession of barriers, or a sort of turnpike gates, through which he has to pass.

AS

S war is the system of government on the old construction, the animosity which nations reciprocally entertain is nothing more than what the policy of their governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and increasing them to hostilities Man is not the enemy of man but through the medium of a false system of government. Instead, therefore, of exclaiming against the ambition of kings, the exclamation should be directed against the principle of such governments; and instead of seeking to reform the individual, the wisdom of a nation should apply itself to reform the system

I love the man that can smile in trouble.

MAN did not enter into society to become worse than

he was before, nor to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. But in order to pursue this distinction with more precision, it is necessary to make the different qualities of natural and civil rights

A few words will explain this. Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others. Civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society.

T

HE natural rights which man retains are all those

in which the power to execute is as perfect in the

individual as the right itself. Among this class, as is before mentioned, are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind: consequently, religion is one of those rights. The natural rights which are not retained, are all those in which, though the right is perfect in the individual, the power to execute them is defective. They answer not his purpose. A man, by natural right, has a right to judge in his own cause; and so far as the right of the mind is concerned, he never surrenders it; but what availeth it him to judge, if he has not power to redress? He therefore deposits his right in the common stock of society, and takes the arm of society, of which he is a part, in preference and in addition to his own. Society grants him nothing. Every man is proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right. From these premises, two or three certain conclusions will follow:

¶ First, That every civil right grows out of a natural right, or, in other words, is a natural right exchanged.

¶ Secondly, That civil power, properly considered as such, is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not his purpose, but when collected to a focus becomes competent to the purpose of every one.

Thirdly, That the power produced from the aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the individual, can not be applied to invade the natural rights which are retained in the individual, and in which the power to execute is as perfect as the right itself.