BIGHTS OF MAN, a famous statement of rights, principally drawn up by Dumont, author of the Smventis de Mirabeau, and solemnly adopted by the French national assembly on Aug. 18, 1783. It declares that all mankind are originally equal ; that the ends of the social union are liberty, property, security,and resistance to oppression; that sover eignty resides in the nation, and that all power emanates from it; that freedom consists in doing everything which does not injure another; that law is the expression of the general will; that public burdens should be Lorne by all the members of the state in proportion to their fortunes; that the elective franchise should be extended to all; and that the exercise of natural rights has no other limit than their interference with the rights of others. Mirabeau endeavored in vain to induce the assembly to postpone pub lishing any declaration of rights until after the formation of the constitution; but the deputies, feeling that a contrary course might imperil their popularity, issued the decla ration—a proceeding which Dumont himself afterward compared to placing a powder magazine under a building, which the first spark of fire world blow into the air. Louis XVL, under the pressure of the events of act, 5, after first refusing, was induced to yield his adhesion to it. The dogma of the equality of mankind on which the declara
tion rests had before been set forth in the American declamation of independence of 1776. Thinkers are now much less incilned than they were in the age of Rousseau to build social theories on such a.bstra•.t, a priori assumptions; and the truth of this doc trine of original equality is directly impugned. Dumont himself asks: "Are all men equal? Where is the equality? Is it in virtue, talents, fortune, industry, situation? Are they free by nature? Sn far from it, they are born in a state of complete dependence on others, from which they are long of being emancipated." The principles laid down in the Viglas of Man were attacked by Edmund Burke in his Rfflections on 'he French Revolution, who represented the declaration as a digest of anarchy. It was in reply to Burke's Reflections that Thomas Paine published in London his Rights of Man, an apology for, and commentary on, the principles •of the. French constitution, for which he was prosecuted for libel on an information by the attorney general, and found guilty.