wisest of men, and the laws which have been established by power, with or without the assent of the society for which they were intended, have alike professed to aim at the promotion of this great end.

These rules of morality or law have necessarily partaken of the error incident to every human achievement; and, moreover, even if we could conceive them to have been, in any instance, perfect when first laid down, they will have required occasional change to suit the changing circumstances of man. From both which causes there must, even in the best of times, have been some discrepancy between that which the legal or moral codes of society recognized as right, and true moral or natural right. This discrepancy it would be the office of wisdom to discover and remove, so as to bring the legal and supposed moral right to coincide as completely as possible with natural right.

Unhappily wisdom has had but little to do with the proceedings of most law-makers; nor, had they all been Solons in capacity, was their real object always hat which they professed to have in view. While the public welfare has been on their lips, their own private advantage, or the indulgence of their selfish passions, was but too frequently uppermost in their minds. In this way the discrepancies between legal and natural rights have been widened, until at times all trace of the latter has disappeared from the institutions of a society, and been utterly lost sight of by those who enforce or expound them; until, in the maze of precedent and prescription, the means have been mistaken and worshipped for the end, and the law has been

looked upon as an abstract something to be venerated and pursued for its own sake, independent of its bearing on the welfare of man; until it has even been stoutly denied that there is, or can be, any other right than that which is established by law.

The absurdity of this not uncommon opinion need hardly be exposed. If there is no right antecedent to the establishment of law, then where there are no laws, as in a newly-occupied country, there are no rights; and men may ill-treat, plunder, nay, murder one another without doing wrong. If law is the only standard of justice, then there must be as many such standards as there are varying laws throughout the world; and it must be right and just that the emperor of Morocco should cut off the heads of his subjects as an amusement before breakfast, if it so pleases him; that the Brazilians should kidnap and make slaves of as many Africans as they can catch, and that the New Zealanders should kill and eat each other with salt and lemon-juice. But it is quite evident that justice is one and invariable; that laws may sanction wrong as well as right; that there must be therefore some other criterion of their justice or rightfulness than their establishment by the local authority of the day, or their antiquity; and this test can, in our opinion, be no other than their tendency to promote to the utmost the welfare of mankind*.

*There are two objections which may be advanced against this foundation of natural rights.

I. That there may be many different opinions as to what tends most to the welfare of mankind; and who is to decide the point? The answer is, that the same objection applies

NATURAL SENTIMENT OF RIGHT.

Believing this object to be favourably regarded by our gracious Maker, we are not surprised to find that He has endowed man with an instinctive sense of right, and a disposition to act in accordance with it. That there is more or less of an intuitive sentiment of justice present in every unprejudiced mind, is scarcely denied by any one, though some refer it to a modification of sympathy, others of selfishness. All the three principles are, indeed, intimately associated. To act to any other supposed foundation of natural right, as the will of God, or the instinctive sentiments of man. The appeal must, in all cases, be to the reason of those who will think upon the subject. It is to that tribunal that every writer addresses himself. Those who do not acknowledge the authority and unity of reason, calmly and impartially exercised, may dispute the propriety of such reference; but then the same persons must dispute, on the same grounds, the existence of any essential distinction between right and wrong, for none can be shown to exist but by an appeal to reason, that is, to enlightened instinct.

II. The second objection is, that the welfare of mankind, meaning thereby the entire species, is an expression so vague as to admit almost any latitude of interpretation. The answer is, that wherever men are gathered together in a social state, the interests of that society must be considered, of course, to be that of the species, unless plain proof to the contrary is made manifest. And again, that the interest of the present generation must be supposed coincident with that of the race, or of future generations, in the absence of strong proof to the contrary. Where such proofs are accessible and clear, then the balance must be struck in favour of the mass and the species. But the welfare of distant nations or ages may well be left by shortsighted mortals to that creative Providence which has endowed them with a power to control to a certain extent their own destiny and that of their species, but has, no doubt, limited that power within such bounds as will prevent their errors from permanently affecting any of the works of His wisdom.

rightly is the surest way of benefiting ourselves as well as our neighbours*.

But in the rude collisions of the world the fine natural sentiment of right is apt to be rubbed off, or incrusted with prejudices of various kinds, and biassed by views of less enlightened selfishness; so that it becomes unsafe to depend on its judgment alone, and necessary to establish fixed rules for the guidance of human conduct in the path of rectitude.

The expediency of some restraint on individual freedom of action is easily seen. Man, by the constitution of his nature, is a social animal. Wherever the species has been observed, it is gathered into groups, composed of several families. But in every society, however limited, the will of the individuals composing it must, by the very nature of things, be limited in its exercise. There is, for example, a physical impossibility that two individuals should stand or lie in the same place, or eat the same fruit or piece of flesh. And

*Man has a law within himself to himself. He hath the rule of right within. All that is wanting is only that he honestly attend to it.'-Butler's Treatise on Human Nature. Hume, Reid, Brown, Lord Kames, and Dugald Stewart, as well as Butler and Locke, uphold the moral sense or social instinct. A recent writer has well described its character. There is in our nature an original and inward principle of love to our kind, expressly designed by its Divine Author to generate our moral sentiments and affections, and ultimately constitute our social happiness.'-Origin, Science, and End of Moral Truth. It is to this principle we appeal when we declare the right' to be whatever is most for the welfare of mankind. It is this principle which alone impresses us with the conviction that there is a right and a wrong, and which, enlightened by knowledge and the most extensive experience, determines by the aid of reason our moral obligations.

RULES OF RIGHT.

yet it must occasionally happen that two or more individuals will feel a desire to occupy the same place, or satisfy their appetites with the same morsel of food. In all such cases one individual must give way to the other. And what is to determine who is to give way?-but one, it is evident, of two things. Either the force of the stronger individual, or some rule of right voluntarily acknowledged by him, or enforced upon his observance by a still stronger party.

It is probable, as has been said, that some simple principles of natural right are instinctively acknowledged by all sound and unwarped minds. But they are, of course, liable to be frequently clouded by prejudice and overborne by opposing passions. A man may feel a consciousness of doing wrong in ill-treating or destroying a fellow creature, or in forcibly taking from him the fruits of his labour; and yet passion, or the desire of selfish indulgence, will occasionally overcome this tendency to the right, and impel him to the commission of wrong. The right, therefore, will but seldom prevail, and wrong must continually be perpetrated by the strong against the weak, unless the right obtain some other support and sanction than the mere instinctive sense of propriety in the breasts of individuals. Now such a supporting influence will naturally arise for the right in the general opinion of the society, backed, as it will usually be, when necessary, by its combined power.

Though the passions of an individual, or his desire for immediate gratification, may overcome his instinctive sense of right in a question con