Page:Annie Besant, Marriage A Plea for Reform, second edition 1882.djvu/8



AS IT WAS, AS IT IS, AND AS IT SHOULD BE.

"Either all human beings have equal rights, or none have any."—

recognition of human rights may be said to be of modern growth, and even yet they are but very imperfectly understood. Liberty used to be regarded as a privilege bestowed, instead of as an inherent right; rights of classes have often been claimed: right to rule, right to tax, right to punish, all these have been argued for and maintained by force; but these are not rights, they are only wrongs veiled as legal rights. Jean Jacques Rousseau struck a new note when he cried: "Men are born free;" free by birthright was a new thought, when declared as a universal inheritance, and this "gospel of Jean Jacques Rousseau" dawned on the world as the sun-rising of a glorious day—a day of human liberty, unrestrained by class. In 1789 the doctrine of the "Rights of Man" received its first European sanction by law; in the August of that year the National Assembly of France proclaimed: "Men are born, and remain, free and equal in rights . . . . The aim of political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; these rights are—liberty, property, safety, and resistance of tyranny." During savage and semi-civilised ages these "imprescriptible rights" are never dreamed of as existing; brute force is king; might is the only right, and the strong arm is the only argument whose logic meets with general recognition. In warlike tribes fair equality is found, and the chief is only primus inter pares; but when the nomadic tribe settles down into an agricultural community, when the habit of bearing arms ceases to be universal, when wealth begins to accumulate, and the village or town offers attractions for pillage, then strength becomes at once a