For the old seafaring men
Came to me now and then
With their sagas of the seas:-

"Of Iceland and of Greenland,
And the stormy Hebrides,
And the undiscovered deep;
I could not eat nor sleep

For thinking of these seas."

In estimating the forces of society, those which are reactionary, and seek to roll men back to their grandfathers, are bad; those which seek the stability of existing institutions or modes of thought are good only as far as they cause accurate inquiry to precede change; while those which tend to develop themselves in new forms are the vital powers which should be cherished and guided into useful growth. That society is the best which brings the largest number of its members into contact with the greatest variety of useful conditions, and preserves the greatest freedom for the evolulution of their powers.

Monotony of occupation, as exhibited in the hereditary castes of India, enables us to observe the evils of a complete violation of this law; but we need not go away from home to see the same mischief on a smaller scale. Our factory system, with its monotonous labour, exerts a depressing influence;

and from the working class to the aristocracy we suffer in different degrees from the want of variety of influences and conditions. The same prejudices affect the same classes for successive years or generations they do not think as men, but as members of orders and parties; and to the great injury of morals and progress there lies upon all a fear of being singularly right, and a preference to being collectively wrong. For liberty and progress men require habits of all sorts and in all directions that are good. The man of one habit or of few habits is a slave to them: freedom demands variety, and all the institutions and arrangements of society should be brought to this test, and questioned whether they permit individuals and masses to develop themselves in a multiplicity of human ways. To this test should be brought monarchies, aristocracies, democracies, churches, tenures, and laws of land and inheritance, systems of taxation, modes of conducting business; and, in fine, all the circumstances which can influence the social character. Nor can one such inquiry serve for subsequent times. Each age has its own wants and its own relations to external forms. The inquiry, therefore, is ever demanded, and the practical effort should be to remove entirely and completely evils that car be so removed at a cost society can afford, and 1

mitigate and set up counter influences against those which must be for a further season endured. Speculative opinion being the ruler of action, it is important that society should be thoroughly penetrated with the love of aspiration and the duty of progress. It should be felt that men ought not to do to-day what they did yesterday; for to-day has higher duties, and provides more ample means. Teachers of stagnation should themselves be sent to school; and those statesmen should be put aside, as curiosities of a bygone time, who represent men as made for the support of institutions, instead of perceiving and proclaiming that institutions are only entitled to remain upon the earth so long as they offer the best-known means of insuring the liberty and happiness of those who live beneath their shade.

CHAPTER VII.

THE DOCTRINE OF RIGHTS.

It is natural that men should seek to obtain what they believe to be their rights, and there is no stronger motive to effect changes in society than the impulse which springs from the consciousness of rights that deserve, but have not obtained recognition in an existing state of affairs. A knowledge of human rights, and a determination to maintain them, are necessary elements of social progress, and the speculative opinions held on these questions offer an easy means of measuring the advance that any people have made. St. Augustine * defines a people to be "a body of men joined together in society by a covenant of right, by a union of interests, and for promoting the common good." Victor Cousin† declares "Duty and Right are brothers; their common mother is Liberty. They are born at the same time, are developed and perish to* 'City of God.' †True, Beautiful, and Good.'

gether.' The simplest idea of right, and also the most comprehensive, is, that men and women have a right to develop and exercise all their faculties so long as they do not deprive other persons of their rights which are of the same nature. The right of property would spring from the principle involved in this statement, because it has a definite relation to industry, acquisitiveness, and other faculties simple or compound. Rights are always correlative to duties, and the moral right to freedom of development is inseparably connected with the duty of self-culture. In some cases rights assume the force of claims to the services and possessions of other people; in others they are simply just and equitable demands to be let alone and freed from hindrance. The moral claim of children upon those who brought them into the world, is for means of subsistence and education during their helpless years, and a similar claim is recognized by the poorlaws of this country on behalf of persons unable to obtain a living. Social rights are the aggregate of individual rights, together with those special rights that have their origin in the circumstances of civil aggregation; and of these the negative rights, or rights not to suffer hindrance, are quite as important as any claims to positive service.

A curious instance of the confusion arising from