ble, or philanthropic, and even
without earning the reputation of being humane.

I wish further to premise that I am considering our subject only with
reference to those who have grown to the age of self-maintenance and
consequent freedom. I do not take into account the rights of children
under that age.

With these premises borne in mind, I would now in the next chapter
call attention to some propositions of fact, which I shall assume
to be established by science and history and by the reader's own
experience and observation, and which I think bear more or less
directly on our subject.

CHAPTER III

THE PROBLEM OF RIGHTS CONTINUED. THE NEED OF LIBERTY OF ACTION FOR
THE INDIVIDUAL

Men are endowed by nature with sundry powers, faculties, capacities,
physical and mental. These, however, are not at all uniform, but are
diverse in kind and degree in different races of men and in different
individuals of the same race. Nature seems to work through diversity
rather than through uniformity, indeed through inequality rather than
through equality. Not all men are born poets, nor are all poets
equally good poets. Not all men are by nature adapted for intellectual
pursuits, and those who are so adapted are not in that respect equally
favored by nature. Even in the field of the simplest manual labor
there is great diversity of natural capacity. It seems to be nature's
theory that mankind, the human race as a whole, will be better served
by diversities, by differences in kinds and degrees of powers, than by
uniformity and equality.

Further, normal men are also by nature endowed, if not with rights,
yet with sundry instincts, desires, passions; also with sundry
feelings, emotions, sentiments; and also with some degree of reason
and power of choice. Some of these may not be apparent in infancy, but
they appear in a greater or less degree of intensity as the individual
develops.

Among these instincts or desires is the desire to live, the desire to
serve each his own welfare and that of his offspring, and the desire
to decide for himself what will best serve that welfare. As a
corollary, he also has by birth the desire for freedom to exercise any
and all of his talents and powers in such manner, to such extent, and
in pursuit of such objects as he prefers, or to be idle if he prefers
idleness. Further, he has the instinct of acquisitiveness, the desire
to appropriate to himself and retain control of such material ob