Far am I from denying in theory, full as far as is my heart from
withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold),
the REAL rights of men. In denying their false claims of right, I do
not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended
rights would totally destroy. If civil society be made for the advantage
of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right. It is
an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting
by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right
to do justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in
politic function, or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the
fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry
fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the
nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruction in
life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately do,
without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and
he has a right to a fair portion of all which society, with all
its combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour. In this
partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that
has but five shillings in the partnership, has as good a right to it, as
he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion. But he has
not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint-stock; and
as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual
ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be
amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society; for I have
in my contemplation the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing
to be settled by convention. If civil society be the offspring of
convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit
and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under
it. Every sort of legislature, judicial, or executory power, are its
creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how
can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which
do not so much as suppose its existence? Rights which are absolutely
repugnant to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and which
becomes one of its fundamental rules, is, THAT NO MAN SHOULD BE JUDGE IN
HIS OWN CAUSE. By this each person has at once divested himself of
the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for
himself, and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his
own governor. He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of
self-defence, the first law of nature. Men cannot enjoy the rights of
an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may obtain justice,
he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most
essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender
in trust of the whole of it.
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do
exist in total independence of it; and exist in much greater clearness,
and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection: but their abstract
perfection is their practical defect. By having a right to everything
they want everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human WANTS. Men have a right that these wants should be
provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned
the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their
passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals
should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in
the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted,
their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This
can only be done BY A POWER OUT OF THEMSELVES, and not, in the exercise
of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is
its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as
well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as
the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances,
and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any
abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that
principle.
The moment you abate anything from the full rights of men, each to
govern himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon
those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government
becomes a consideration of convenience. This it is which makes the
constitution of a state, and the due distribution of its powers, a
matter of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep
knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which
facilitate or obstruct the various ends, which are to be pursued by the
mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its
strength, and remedies to its distempers. What is the use of discussing
a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the
method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall
always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician,
rather than the professor of metaphysics. The science of constructing
a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other
experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short
experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the
real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which
in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter
operation; and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it
produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens; and very plausible
schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and
lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and
almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little
moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may
most essentially depend. The science of government being therefore so
practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter
which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can
gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is
with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an
edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common
purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models
and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like rays of light
which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted
from their straight line. Indeed in the gross and complicated mass of
human passions and concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a
variety of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to
talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original
direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of
the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition
or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature, or to the
quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed
at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss
to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade,
or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments are
fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If you were to
contemplate society in but one point of view, all these simple modes
of polity are infinitely captivating. In effect each would answer its
single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain
all its complex purposes. But it is better that the whole should be
imperfectly and anomalously answered, than that, while some parts are
provided for with great exactness, others might be totally neglected, or
perhaps materially injured, by the over-care of a favourite member.
The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in
proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and
politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of MIDDLE, incapable
of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men
in governments are their advantages, and these are often in balances
between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good
and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a
computing principle, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing,
morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral
denominations.
By these theorists the right of the people is almost always
sophistically confounded with their power. The body of the community,
whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but
till power and right are the same, the whole body of them has no right
inconsistent with virtue, and the first of all virtues--prudence.