relation has a necessary result. "Rights" being the name for all claims founded on certain relations between men which have a particular, necessary and definite result, are as inherent in the nature of things as are the relations of geometry or physics. Bentham and Burke could expel the belief in "innate rights," but they could no more expel innate rights themselves, than they could expel the axioms of geometry, and it follows also that the theory of natural law was raised on a basis of solid truth, and only the ambiguity arising from a confusion between the scientific and the legal signification of the word "law" can explain the contempt with which some persons treat the term "natural law" and its derivative "natural rights," a contempt which is truly astonishing.

Now jurists do not admit the truth of the theory of rights described above. They hold that rights are created by sanctions and cannot exist apart from their sanctions. They defined legal rights as "rights created and sanctioned by law," and they further maintain that there are no "rights," properly speaking, sane "legal rights," since all other rights," moral, natural and innate, are metaphors and nothing else. This doubtless is to what Professor Dicey is alluding when he writes, that since the time of Bentham the belief in innate rights is obsolete. This view of rights" postulates that men, jurists, can create justice

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and truth and can demolish them at will. So monstrous a claim should not pass unnoticed. Let us therefore criticise the jurists' definition of legal rights, "rights created and sanctioned by law."

In the first place, "rights" is an abstract term. Politics (which includes the science of rights) is an abstract science, since it deals with the attributes of society (i.e., relations of men), considered apart from society; just as mathematics is an abstract science, since it deals with relations of numbers, for numbers are not things but attributes of

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things. Rights" are attributes of society, and " a right" is as abstract a term as an improper fraction."

It may be objected that this analogy is erroneous, for many hold that the relations of men cannot be considered apart from men, in the way that numbers can be considered apart from things, and that, therefore, politics cannot be an abstract science. But how can it be maintained that the proverb "Honesty is the best policy" is not as abstract a proposition as that "a proper fraction is one whose numerator is less than its denominator"? The term "honesty" is surely an attribute of society considered apart from society.

The term "a right," although an abstract term, may be used in reference to concrete things, just as the term “a quadratic equation," although an abstract term, may be used to solve a concrete problem; and it can no more be contended that "rights" cannot be an abstract term since it is often used in connection with roads and property, than it can be contended that "a vulgar fraction" is not an abstract term because it may be used in connection with a grocer's accounts.

The relations of men are seldom considered in the abstract, but to deny therefore that politics is, or ought to be, an abstract science is as though the savage counting his toes, were to deny the possibility of considering the relations of numbers apart from toes, or in other words, to deny that mathematics was an abstract science.

The full significance of this, apparently superfluous, metaphysical digression as to the abstract nature of the term rights" becomes apparent when we reflect on what its truth involves. If the term "rights" is an abstract term, denoting particular relations that have a necessary consequence, "rights" cannot be created by any human agency. The most that the law can do is to define, classify, and sanction "rights": it can no more create "a right" than

it can create an axiom of mathematics. Were the law to attempt to create an axiom of mathematics, by decreeing that henceforth two and two are to make five, the decree doubtless might be enforced on accountants at the cost of distracting business complications and no little injustice. Yet, in spite of the law and subservient clerks, two and two would still make four and not five. And in the same way with "a right." A given relation between men must have as necessary a result as a given relation between numbers. Those relations which have a beneficial result to society are "rights," whether enforced by law or not, and those relations which have an evil result are not "rights," though they may be legal and sanctioned by all the terrors of the most powerful law conceivable.

Wherever the law has sanctioned a genuine right it has furthered the welfare of humanity. Wherever it has attempted to create "a right," by labelling some relation of men "a legal right," which was not "a right" independently of law, it has thereby wrought unmitigated evil

Our law sanctions the right of every man to be protected from slander, robbery and murder: it sanctions the right of accused persons to a speedy trial. Inasmuch as these. rights are unquestionably essential conditions of human welfare it is evident that they exist independently of law, although it is equally evident that by enforcing these rights law confers a benefit on us all, But in France, before the Revolution, the law did not sanction these "rights." It preferred to create "rights." That is, it sanctioned powers and privileges for the aristocracy and the clergy which, apart from law, were not rights, and labelled these, its iniquitous creations, "legal rights." Much the same may be said of Russia at the present day. What has been the result in both cases? The "legal rights" of the French church and the French nobility reduced France to starvation and a bloody revolution. The "legal rights" of

the Russian bureaucracy are reducing Russia to ruin and anarchy.

Professor Holland contends that "it causes great confusion to imagine any connection between a 'legal right' and the abstract term 'right,' or the eulogistic adjective 'right.'" It certainly does. Yet the fact remains that the connection is anything but imaginary.

Sir Henry Maine has pointed out that the origin of "legal rights was the judgments of those in authority as to what was right. "Legal rights," being derived from moral conceptions of right, it follows that, whenever, as frequently happened, those moral conceptions were erroneous, the term "legal rights," when applied to the so-called "rights" derived from those moral conceptions, was metaphorical. Whenever the term "legal right" has been, or is, used to cover some "wrong" sanctioned by law, it has been, or is, a metaphor and nothing else. Therefore, contrary to the teaching of jurists, it is precisely "legal rights" that are more frequently "metaphorical" than any other.

"The ultimate object of law," says Professor Holland, “is no doubt nothing less than the well-being of society," and, although the cynic may smile, it is satisfactory to think that those worthy of the legal profession acknowledge such an aim. But if there is any truth in history, once we admit this exalted aim to be the ultimate object of law, we are forced to admit that the immediate object of law is the classification and protection of rights, and not, as Professor Holland and other jurists teach, the creation and protection of rights. It is of course open to jurists to contend that lawyers, qua lawyers, are obliged, if they are to fulfil their professional duties, to assume that "legal rights" are the only genuine "rights," and if they assume this they must further assume that the law can create "rights." And as long as jurists define "legal rights" as they do, for legal purposes only, law being what it is now, no one could

quarrel with them. But when jurists apply their legal definitions to the decision of matters beyond their own system of law, as for instance, when Professor Dicey summarily dismisses a claim urged on behalf of a large section of the community by the assertion that there are no such things as "innate rights," then it is time for the public to rebel, and to point out that legal formulas are often nothing but fictions necessary to justify the imperfections of legal principles.

A knowledge of all the bitter sorrow and care and misery still caused by legal injustice, makes it the duty of every responsible adult to do all that lies in their power to urge the necessity of legal reform, and legal reform will never be completed until such time as genuine "rights" only are legally recognized, and it thus becomes possible to adequately and truthfully define legal rights as "those rights which are sanctioned by law."

It is foreign to our purpose to discuss here the meaning of the terms "natural" and "moral rights," beyond observing that such classifications are, like the term "legal rights," distinctions drawn between the sanctions which enforce "rights," and are not distinctions between "rights" themselves.

The whole object of this inquiry has been to make clear one cardinal point, and that is that "Rights exist independently of any sanction." The terms "innate and abstract rights' embody this truth, for they are used in antithesis to such terms as "moral or legal rights," to signify all the innumerable rights which are not sanctioned by law, public opinion, religion, or anything else.

Men had "a right" to freedom in the days of slavery, just as much as they have now, although in those days, that "right" had no sanction for slaves, either moral, natural or legal. "Rights," being claims founded on the necessary result of given relations between men, are "rights" whether those claims be enforced or not.