Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/97

.] dread of retaliation, the dread of legal punishment, the dread of social dislike, and the dread of divine vengeance.

Besides this sentiment of Justice, which corresponds to and re-enforces the objective requirements, there emerges with the evolution of intelligence an intellectual perception, an idea, or even an intuition of Justice. It is obscure among warlike peoples, but distinct among relatively peaceful peoples. The two elements of the idea are, (1) each man's recognition of his claims to unimpeded activity and the result it brings, and (2) the consciousness of limits necessitated by the like claims of others. The first is the "brute" element in the conception, the second the "human" element (p. 40). The first has for its ideal inequality; the second, equality. The latter is the later growth. Modern socialists suppose equality the only element of Justice, as primitive savages held inequality to be. But the true conception of justice is found in a synthesis of both. And "no incongruity exists when the ideas of equality and inequality are applied, the one to the bounds and the other to the benefits" (p. 43). That is to say, Justice consists in the liberty of each, limited only by the like liberties of all. This law of equal freedom is the principle of natural equity, the law of nature, to which jurists have always looked as a basis for systems of law.

Our belief in the authority of Justice is warranted by "consciousness after it has been subject to the discipline of prolonged social life," and it is also "deducible from the conditions to be fulfilled, firstly, for the maintenance of life at large, and secondly, for the maintenance of social life" (p. 60; cf. p. 152).

Chapters viii to xxi are devoted to deducing, and tracing the historical development of, the various rights which may be inferred as corollaries from the supreme law of equal freedom. These rights coincide with ordinary ethical conceptions and have in every case legal enactments corresponding with them, — enactments of which they are the ground and not vice versa. They are the right to life and physical integrity, the right to free motion and locomotion (which involves the repudiation of slavery), the right to the unimpeded use of light, of air, and (so far as justice to existing land-holders permits) of the earth, the right to property, both material and immaterial, the right to give and bequeath, the right to free exchange, free contract, and free industry, the rights of free belief and worship and of free speech and publication. The rights of women are modified by the marital relation, for which Mr. Spencer is disposed to assert pretty strongly the leadership of the husband, and by an incapacity for military and other burdensome functions, which involves the loss of certain political privileges. The right of children to gratis benefits, resting as it does on the same primary requirement (preservation of the species) as the law of equal freedom,