Political rights include the right of every person who is a member of the nation to the actual determination of a person in its destination. The personality of each is to be respected in it, and to act in it, not negatively but positively, not passively to be allowed as if the nation were only some power over it, but it is to act as itself a determinate power in it. Since the normal and moral process of the nation is in the determination of personality, every individual who, being a member of it, has personality, has the right to its determinate assertion in the nation. It is its defect when, by an arbitrary act, certain persons are included and determine its action and certain other persons are excluded.

Political rights include also the recognition and institution of all those rights which are involved in the relations of life as a moral order. These are to be guarded and affirmed by the nation, which is invested with authority to maintain the order of society. Thus the family in its normal and moral conception is to be maintained by it, and the violation of its organic law is to be punished.

Rights have their correspondence in duties; they may be arbitrarily separated, but it cannot be without the defect or the distortion of the one or the other. Since rights have a moral content, to every right a duty corresponds, but it does not follow that a right corresponds also to every duty, since there are immediate duties in the relations of life, as for instance, the duty of a child to its parents.

Rights and duties have the same ground in personality. Rights have not their ground in duties, and do not proceed as if only derivative from them. A right is a condition, in which there may be the fulfillment of a duty; but a right is not simply the means for the fulfillment of a duty, only the instrument by which a duty is performed, and having apart from that no significance. Rights no less than the fulfillment of duties have their immediate content in

personality; they are therefore to be held not simply as subsequent to duties, and as if only incident to them. Since rights proceed in their conception from a righteous will, and subsist in that, therefore in the realization of rights there is the fulfillment of duties. The rejection of the immediate foundation of rights and duties in personality can result only in the construction of a formal law of duty and a formal system of rights.

Mr. Caird has said that, "in the philosophy of Kant, the demand for the rights of man first manifested its true nature, because in that philosophy the claim of right was based on the idea of duty."1 But rights are based in personality, and in that alone can they subsist, and from that alone is their content derived. Kant asserted that the rights of man exist only in conformance to an abstract moral law, and only for an end defined in that law, but this can become the ground only of a formal conception of rights and a formal freedom. It would merge the being of the state into a formal system of laws. The necessary inference of this postulate of Kant, is the derivation of the right of personality from a law of duty, and thus he assumed it to be resultant from the law, "Let not thyself be used as a means.' But this reference of the right of personality to an abstract and formal law, and its definition in the limitations of that law, is not a sufficient ground for the right of personality. This law, for instance, which requires me to guard my own personality, and forbids that I should allow myself to be used as a means to an end, is obviously too narrow; it does not comprehend the right of personality, for this involves the right against other persons, that they also shall respect my personality, and shall not use, nor dare to use me as a means to an end.

1 Inaugural Lecture in the Common Hall of Glasgow College, by Edward Caird, 1866. Kant's Rechtslehre, sec. xliii. See Stahl, Phil. des Rechts, vol. ii.

sec. 1, p. 96.

The rights of the organic people, or national rights, have an integral unity as they are instituted in the realization of the nation as a moral person. They do not compose simply a formal system. They are not a mere accumulation of institutions, to be held by the people, as a miscellaneous budget of receipts, nor do they exist only as proceeding from the duties of the people, and as the resultant of certain obligations. The rights of the people subsist in the consciousness of the people in its unity, and this is the condition of political rights. They bear in their form the imprint of the type of the nation's individuality, and are the expression of its spirit. institution they constitute its political order. thus in its political course the expression of its the subjection to it of the whole external order. There is indeed apparent in the institution of its rights, the influence of the physical condition of the people, the age, the land, the climate, the races, but these only modify while they cannot determine its process; this is determined only in the freedom of the people, and is the manifestation of its spirit.

In their There is

aim and

The rights of the people have a universal as an individual element, and move toward one end in every nation, and thus there is a correspondence in different nations. But the one element does not preclude the other, they have an integral and individual character. They have no exotic forms, and cannot at once be transplanted from one people to another. They cannot be applied as abstract ideas adopted with some abstract system. Thus, in the development of rights, while they may not always have the harmony of a system, yet formed in the life of the people they have a deeper unity, and, wrought and forged in the great events of its history, they have subtler power and robuster proportions.

There is a certain representation of rights in which

they are defined as original and acquired rights. But strictly there is only one original right, the right of personality, and to this all others may be referred. It is the right which is primitive in the rights of man, the right of a man to be himself. The term acquired rights, when rights are held as the acquisition or private property of certain individuals or families, denotes a condition isolated from the normal and organic being of the nation, and deriving its content from traditional force, or custom or accident; it describes rather the privileges or prerogatives of an individual or a class. These may invade the whole sphere of natural rights, and when encroaching upon them, become in reality the ancient wrongs of a people. Acquired rights are positive, but they have no necessary basis beyond, and exist only as the creation of law.

There is a definition of rights as absolute and relative. The defect in the phrase absolute, as applied to rights, has been noticed; there is, moreover, no necessary antithesis to separate relative rights and the rights of personality, since all rights are the rights of persons in certain relations. The term describes mainly the rights of persons in certain necessary relations, as for instance the rights in the family, of the parent and child, of the husband and wife, and these relations are founded in nature, and maintained by the nation, as belonging to a moral order.

There is sometimes added to the same category the rights of corporations,—"artificial persons created by law, under the denomination of persons." These rights are more exactly defined as franchises and privileges. They are formed by vesting a certain individual, or a number of individuals, in a corporate character with an artificial personality, and attaching thereto certain definite franchises and privileges, which, since the artificial personality is constructed, are described as rights. They are

11 Kent's Comm. 3.

created by the state in its enactment, and have their origin and limitation in positive law. Their accumulation in great monopolies, presumed to be chartered for the public advantage, is to be rigorously defined, and if not guarded may be an injury to the natural rights of the people. They are only the creation of law and exist always in subordination to the law of the public weal, but the strength, which resides in their assumption, by a legal fiction, of personality, is a significant illustration of the real ground of rights.

There is a definition, the most prominent in the history of civil rights, in which they are described as the rights of persons and the rights of things. This had its source in Roman law, which defined rights as ad personam and ad rem, and it had there a better justification than in later civilization, since in Roman law the definition of humanity, as Hegel says, was impossible.1 In Roman law, rights ad personam are not the rights of a person as such, but the rights of a certain person or of a person in a certain status; personality as distinct from slavery, is represented as only a status or a condition. The phrase in which the distinction appears, remains as a reminiscence of the Roman conception, or is retained as a technical term or as a nice rhetorical antithesis. It denotes, says Christian, "by the former the rights of persons in public stations, and by the latter the rights of persons in private relations." 2 But since all rights are the rights of persons, and things can be only the objects of action, the merely verbal antithesis involves confusion and may become the source of constant error.

The description of rights as existent in some formal

1 Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts, p. 23.

21 Bl. Comm. 123.

"Now rights and obligations are manifestly the attributes of persons, not of