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quently can have to confer, are privileges in respect of person or property other than one's own. But such legalised privileges are not necessarily rights. Whether they are so actually or not depends mainly on the character of the legislative authority. A right to interfere with rights not based upon law cannot be conferred without the consent of the parties in whom the independent rights are vested, given either directly by themselves or indirectly through their representatives. If a legislative body be truly and thoroughly representative of the community which it controls, then every one of its enactments, however bad or foolish, is virtually an engagement to which every member of the community is a party, and any privilege arising out of it becomes to all intents and purposes a right. If, on the other hand, the legislative authority be autocratic, or if it represent only certain favoured sections of the community, then none of its enactments, however wise and good, of which a majority of the public disapprove, and which interfere with the rights termed by Mr. Mill 'moral,' are morally binding, except on the legislators themselves and their immediate constituents. Any one else may quite blamelessly break the law, and resist any privilege thereby created, though he must, of course, be prepared, in case of detection, to take the legal consequences of his disobedience. For example, protective duties, however impolitic, if imposed because a majority of the nation were of opinion that a certain branch of domestic industry had better be fostered by protection, could not be evaded without injustice to those engaged in the protected industry, though there would be no injustice in smuggling, if they had been imposed in opposition to the general sense of the public by a packed Parliament or an absolute monarch. The same legal monopoly, which in the one case could not be justly evaded, could not in the other be justly enforced. A legal privilege, in short, becomes a right only when a majority of those at whose expense it is to be exercised, have formally consented either directly or indirectly to its being exercised; and it then becomes a right solely because an engagement has been entered into, in virtue of which, whatever is requisite for its satisfaction has become due. Thus it appears that, whatever legal rights are genuine, and are not at the same time 'moral' rights also, resolve themselves into specimens of the right to fu
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