RIGHT. A well-founded claim. If people believe that humanity itself establishes or proves certain claims, either upon fellow-be ings, or upon society or government, they call these claims human rights ; if they believe that these claims inhere in the very nature of man himself, they called them inherent, inalienable rights ; if people believe that there inheres in monarchs a claim to rule over their subjects by divine appointment, they call the claim divine right, jus divinum; if the claim is founded or given by law, it is a legal right. The ideas. of claim and that the claim must be well founded always con stitute the and of right. Rights can only inhere in and exist between moral beings: and no moral beings can• coexist without rights, consequently without obligations. Right and obligation are correlative ideas. The idea of a well-founded claim becomes in law a claim founded in or established by the law: so that we may say a right in law is an acknowledged claim.
Men are by their inherent nature moral and social beings ; they have, therefore, mu tual claims upon one another. Every well grounded claim on others is called a right, and, since the social character of man gives the element of mutuality to each claim, every right conveys along with it the idea of obli gation. Right and obligation are correlative. The consciousness of all constitutes the first foundation of the right or makes the claim well grounded. Its incipiency arises instinc tively out of the nature of man. Man feels that he has a right of ownership over that which he has produced out of appropriated matter, for instance, the bow he has made of appropriated wood ; he, feels that he has a right to exact obedience from his children, long before laws formally acknowledge or protect these rights ; but he feels, too, that if he claims the bow which he made as his own, he ought to acknowledge (as correla tive obligation) the same right in another man to the bow which he may have made; or if he, as father, has a right to the obe dience of his children, they have a corres ponding claim on him for protection as long as they are incapable to protect themselves. The idea of rights is coexistent with that of authority (or government) ; both are inher ent in man ; but if we understand by gov ernment a coherent system of laws by which a state is ruled, and if we understand by state a sovereign society, with distinct au thorities to make and execute laws, then rights precede government, or the establish ment of states, which is expressed in the an cient law maxim: Ne ex regula jus suma tur, sed ex jure quod est, regula fiat. See
GOVERNMENT. We cannot refrain from re ferring the reader to the noble passage of Sophocles, CEdyp. Tyr. 876 et seq., and to the words of Cicero, in his oration for Milo: Est enim hcce, judices, non scripts sed nata lex ; quam non didicimus, accepinuus, legimvus; verum ea natura ipsa arripufmus, hausintus, espressimus; ad quam non docti sed facti; non instituti sed imbuti sumus.
As rights. precede government, so we find that now rights are acknowledged above gov ernments and their states, in the case of in ternational law. International law is found ed on rights, that is, well-grounded claims which civilized states, as individuals, make upon one another. As governments come to be more and more clearly established, tights are more clearly acknowledged and protect ed by the laws, and right comes to mean a claim acknowledged and protected by the law. A legal right, a constitutional right, means a right protected by the law, by the constitution ; but government does not create the idea of right or original rights; it ac knowledges them; just as government does not create property or values and money, it acknowledges and regulates them. If it were otherwise, the question would present itself, whence does government come? whence does it derive its own right to create rights? By compact? But whence did the contracting parties derive their right to create a govern ment that is to make rights? We would be consistently led to adopt the idea of a gov ernment by jus divirnum„—that is, a govern ment deriving its authority to introduce and establish rights (bestowed on it in particular) from a source wholly separate from human society and the ethical character of man, in the same manner in which we acknowledge revelation to come from a source not human.