es.' But if this cannot
be shown, the validity of the actual possessor's title must not be
impugned. Property must be treated as of innocent acquisition and
derivation until proved to be of guilty. And that not merely because
there could otherwise be no rights of property at all, since it must
always be impossible for any owner to demonstrate that neither he nor
any one of those from whom he derives ever either overreached in a
bargain or failed in a contract; but also, and much more, because
whether a person be or be not the rightful owner of the wealth in his
possession, no one can possibly be entitled to despoil him unless the
wealth can be shown to have been ill-gotten. That right must be held to
be complete with which no one can show a right to interfere.

The gravest, however, of Mr. Mill's criticisms is that mine is 'a
doctrine _a priori_, claiming to command assent by its own light, and to
be evident by simple intuition.' This is an imputation to which I am so
unaware of having laid myself open that I can account for its having
been made only on the supposition that Mr. Mill, in common with most
other Utilitarians, imagines that their only opponents are
Intuitionists, and that it is only necessary to set aside the tenets of
these in order to get their own established instead. If this were really
the case, utilitarian advocacy would be a comparatively easy task.
Intuitionism, whether capable or not of being disproved, is by its
nature unsusceptible of decisive proof. If I, in support of the
proposition that there is in the human mind an intuitive sense of any
sort, were to assert that I had such a sense while you denied that you
had, it would be impossible for me to prove you to be mistaken, while,
unless you were mistaken as to your individual experience, I should
clearly be mistaken as to the generalisation which I had based upon
mine. But I never said a word about an intuitive sense of right and
wrong. How could I, seeing, as no one who chooses to look can fail to
see, that the instincts of untutored children prompt them to disregard
all rights but their own, to spit cockchafers, rob birds' nests, and
confiscate younger children's cakes and apples? All I say is that there
may be and are rights independent of and even opposed to utility, and
these, for reasons which shall immediately be stated, I call natural
rights; but I do not say that they are intuitively perceived. As for
sense of justice or of duty, or mo