Zeitschrift für Internationales Privat-und Offentliches Recht. Vol. XVIII, part 6. Leipsic: 1908. -The legal position of an English joint-stock company in Germany suggests some useful points of law (p. 547). In a report of the rights of an English pauper at Berlin, an English case is cited, a most unusual thing in a German tribunal, but no reference is given except a German textbook. The matter is governed by reciprocity (p. 553). The question of the discharge of an obligation in whole or in part is a question for the Court of the country in which the obligation is to be fulfilled (Erfüllungsort, p. 556).

La Giustizia Penale. 14 Jan.-11 March, 1909. Rome.This periodical, now in its fifteenth year, continues to maintain its high standard in reviewing and reporting. There are several cases on the Weekly Day of Rest Law 1907. In one of them it was held that a barber was not liable for an infraction of the law by opening his shop on Sunday for the purpose of cleaning the implements of his trade (p. 149). There is a rather strange decision to the effect that the game of morra is not a game of hazard, although it is classed as such in the schedule to one of the sections of the Penal Code (p. 119). This seems rather like the judicial repeal of an Act of Parliament. A witness called as witness to a fact and later in the trial as an expert need not be sworn a second time (p. 217).

JAMES WILLIAMS.

Books received, reviews of which have been held over owing to want of space ---Wade-Evans' Welsh Mediaval Law; Lightwood's Time Limit on Actions; Every Man's own Lawyer; Holdsworth's History of English Law, Vols. II & III; Hynes & Jameson's County Council Licences; Maclean's Law of Secondary and Preparatory Schools; Mackenzie & Lushington's Registration Manual; Stone's Justices' Manual; Aske's Custom and Usages of Trade, Butterworths' Quarterly Digest; Thomas' Leading Cases in Constitutional Law.

Other publications received :-Pratt's Policy of Licensing Justices (P. S. King & Son); Pellerin's French Law of Wills (Stevens & Sons); Copyright Law of the United States of America (Government Printing Office, Washington); Items of Legal news, April, 1909 (Lawyers' Co-operative Publishing Co., U.S.A.).

THE

LAW MAGAZINE AND REVIEW.

No. CCCLIII.-AUGUST, 1909.

I. THE BELIEF IN INNATE RIGHTS.

"THE

HE belief in innate rights," says Professor Dicey, in an article against Women's Suffrage, which appeared in the Quarterly for January, 1909, "was expelled from England by the passionate and irresistible reasoning of Burke and the cool and deadly analysis of Bentham."

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Had Professor Dicey written, was expelled from the mind of the jurist," in place of "was expelled from England," the proposition would have called for no remark. But the Professor wrote "England," and it behoves every lover of justice to protest against such a statement.

In Law and Opinion Professor Dicey has traced with unerring hand the steady growth of socialist ideas in recent years. With this new mental atmosphere has arisen a school of thought which, although it assumes, with Professor Dicey and John Stuart Mill, that utility is the ethical criterion and human welfare the ethical aim, deduces from these assumptions a line of argument as regards "rights" altogether different from Professor Dicey's.

"The claims to Parliamentary votes as a matter of abstract rights," says Professor Dicey, a little further on in the same article, "is part of an obsolete creed." It would be interesting to know on what other philosophical ground any one could claim a vote since legal philosophers could not be so illogical as to contend that anything may be

right" in theory and not in practice, or vice versa. But, suppressing such curiosity, there are many persons in England to-day ready to defend the belief that political loyalty to the supremacy of "Abstract Right," so far from being obsolete, remains the only possible guide and curb to the inevitable and fast approaching reign of a complete democracy. The political belief in "Abstract Right" constitutes the only court of appeal there is against democratic oppression and injustice.

Professor Dicey's words carry weight, since he is acknowledged to be one of the most eminent of living jurists, and the serious nature of his contention that the political belief in "innate rights" and "abstract right" is obsolete furnishes the excuse for the following essay, which is nothing but a recapitulation of self-evident truths, truths which refute the foregoing quotations from the Quarterly.

The modern theory of "rights," postulates utilitarian principles and may be summarised somewhat as follows:Bentham describes the word "rights," as the most ambiguous in the English language. But a careful analysis of the adjective "right," the abstract noun "right" and the term "a right," dispels its ambiguity and places Bentham's immortal legal-philosophy on a sounder basis than the weak and careless framework on which he raised it himself. Following the maxim that we must seek the meaning of the universal in the particular, we must begin by considering the word "right" in its adjectival and adverbial form.

Derived from the Latin rectus, straight, the word "right," from constant metaphorical use, gradually acquired many significations, such as goodness, correctness, truth, etc.

An action was "right" if it was thought good. A method was "right" if it was successful in achieving the desired. end. The solution of a problem was "right" if it proved correct. A proposition was "right" if it was true. But

since far the most frequent use of the word "right" was for judging the moral value of men's actions, and since some system of morality is the sine quâ non of society, the adjective "right" has, of necessity, come to have chiefly a moral significance. It usually means good.

Little by little, through much tribulation and despair, men have noted that which makes for their good and they have called it "right," and that which injures them and they have called it "wrong." Broadly speaking, therefore, the adjective "right" signifies the attribute of being for the benefit of humanity, and the adjective "wrong" the reverse. If this definition be correct, "right" and "wrong" are no mere juggle of words, as in pessimistic mood we are inclined to believe. No matter how often in ignorance and prejudice men have misapplied the terms, there remain a positive and actual "right" and a positive "wrong," just as, in the same way, no matter how often a child makes a mistake in an addition sum and insists that two and two make five, it in no way alters the fact that two and two make four. The word "right" postulates as immutable relations between men as the word mathematics postulates between quantities and between magnitudes.

The adjective "right" in its usual, i.e., its moral sense, signifies the attribute peculiar to those relations between men which further the welfare of humanity. Thus, "honesty," is a relation of men to each other which furthers human welfare, hence "honesty" is "right." Again, "justice" is a relation between men acknowledged by all to be essential to society, hence "justice" is "right." There is no action which can be described as "right" which does not, on examination, prove to be "right" only because it is a relation of men which benefits humanity. The difficulty, as everyone knows, does not consist in defining the meaning of "right," as to which most of us are agreed, but in pronouncing which relations of men are "right," and which "wrong," matters in which few of us agree.

The adjective "right" may be defined therefore as the attribute peculiar to those relations between men which further the welfare of humanity.

2. Turning now to the universal. The abstract noun "right" is derived from the adjective "right," just as goodness is derived from good, and whiteness from white. We should use the word "rightness" to signify "abstract right," and were this always done much confusion of thought would thereby be avoided. Unfortunately custom has ordained otherwise. 'Abstract right," or, more correctly, rightness," it is hardly necessary to add, is the name for the attribute connoted by the adjective "right," when considered apart from any object. It is the name for the attribute, peculiar to certain relations of men, of furthering the general welfare.

3. In defining the term "a right" we return from the universal to the particular. "A right" is an abbreviation of the adverbial phrase "it is right that." For example, the phrases "All men have a right to justice," and "I have a right to liberty," are merely more concise ways of saying, "It is right that all men should have justice," "It is right that I should have liberty."

Hence "a right" may be defined as "a claim to some particular thing on the ground that the claim is founded on a relation between men which has the attribute of rightness."

To illustrate the meaning of this definition :-A. owes B. £20 for goods supplied to him. Few question that it is right (i.e., a relation between men furthering human welfare) that men should pay their just debts, hence B. has "a right" to £20 from A. because his claim to that sum is founded on a relation between men which has the attribute of rightness.

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Granting that the foregoing analysis is correct, the term a right" implies that a given relation has a necessary result, just as the term "a logarithm" implies that a given