The Rights of Man

Oscar B. Johannsen

[Reprinted from The Gargoyle, June, 1957]

Henry George's essay, "The Rights of Man" is a powerful argument for natural rights. "One of (the) facts, attested by universal consciousness, is that there are rights as between man and man which existed before the formation of government, and which continue to exist in spite of the abuse of government; that there is a higher law than any human law -- to wit, the law of the Creator impressed upon and revealed through nature, which is before and above human laws and upon conformity to which all human laws must depend for their validity. To deny this is to assert that there is no standard whatever by which the rightfulness or wrongfulness of laws and institutions can be measured; to assert that there can be no actions in themselves right and none in themselves wrong; to assert that an edict which commanded mothers to kill their children should receive the same respect as a law prohibiting infanticide.

"These natural rights, this higher law, form the only true and sure basis for social organization. ...We must conform our institutions to the great moral laws -- laws to which we are absolutely subject, and which are as much above our control as are the laws of matter and of motion."

Henry George was only too well aware of the perverse nature of man not to realize that tho he knows the truth he may act as tho he was absolutely unaware of it. It is possible for men to see the truth, and assert the truth, and to hear and repeat, again and again, formulas embodying the truth, without realizing all that that truth involves. Men who signed the Declaration of Independence, or applauded the Declaration of Independence, men who year after year read it, and heard it, and honored it, did so without thinking that the eternal principles of right which it invoked condemned the existence of negro slavery as well as the tyranny of George III."

But he points out that the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness involves the right of each to the free use of his power to make a living limited only to the equal right of all others. The fact that a man is free to speak, to congregate, to worship becomes a bitter mockery when he is denied the right to make a living, this is, in effect, what happens when all the land is enclosed, and no one is permitted its use unless payment made to the "owner."

He gives a vividly moving description of a "free-born Englishman," free in every respect, "free to work for himself, and free to enjoy the fruits of his labor. But a man cannot labor without something to labor on, any more than he can eat without having something to eat." The Englishman of Saxon times was actually freer for when he came of age he would have been allotted his house-plot and his seed-plot, would have had an equal share in the fields the villages cultivated, could graze his beasts on the common pasturage.

But as a result of the land-grabbing of the Tudors, the commons and all the land became "my lord's private park and estate, elevating him to a position which Tennyson called, "the God Almighty of the countryside."

In George's time, the Englishman was reduced to a condition of servitude worse than slavery. As George said, "so long as a plump, well-kept, hearty negro was worth $1000 no slave-owner, selfish or cold-blooded as he might be, would keep his negroes as great classes of free-born Englishmen must live. But these white slaves have no money value. It is not the labor, it is the land that commands the labor, that has a capitalized value." The great wealth of the English landlords of George's day was due to the fact that, "it being conceded that they own the land the people who do produce wealth must hand their earnings over to them."

He warned that the same inequality of conditions which were beginning to be noticed in America had their same primary cause. "American citizenship confers no right to American soil. The first and most essential rights of man -- the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- are denied here as completely as in England. And the same results must follow.

Living today in the hot-house culture of inflation, socialism,_and paternalism the people are not yet quite aware of what is to follow, but it will probably be worse than the conditions the "free-born Englishman" of George's time suffered.