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the occasion to conceal its identity, subsequently sold it to its owner for a price. We are in the same fix as the poor old man; for the sophist has taken our previous knowledge, namely, that we were divinely endowed with a right to life just so long as we could manage to live, and no longer; and having singed it and otherwise fixed it over into a "self-evident truth" so as for the occasion to conceal its identity, he makes us buy it back again. The measure of my respect for the jockey, considerably exceeds my respect for the sophist: for the former did understand his game, but the latter was too infatuate to see the cheat. It evidently appears, from his imperturbable gravity, that it never occurred to him that he communicated no knowledge—he never mistrusted that the right to life consisted in the possession, and was to be proved by it, if proved at all—that the right to the pursuit of happiness, was to be proved by the pursuit if capable of proof; and so in all practical purposes as to the right to liberty.
A sentence or two upon "rights" may not be amiss. I conceive the author, and all readers of the Declaration who have tried to give credence to these passages, to be deceived by the supposition that the word "rights" could carry the same meaning when applied to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as when applied as a substitute for "title" to lands or houses. If I am ousted of possession of my house, I prove my right by certain human endowments. I set up a human right, not a divine one. If I should set up a divine right, namely a right founded on an endowment of my Creator, I know of no way to prove the correctness of my title, but to dig up a Mormon New Testament with the revelation of my right set forth unless I go before the court where the record is kept, to wit, on the other side of the grave. At all events, I could get no better testimony, in this world, than a Mormon revelation.[1]
The word "rights," as the author of the Declaration and others like him use it, communicates a fiction, not a fact. Our knowledge cannot be increased by such a use of the word; it brings no additional idea, to speak of a right to life, more than to speak of a right to a right. Such an arrangement of words possesses no
- ↑ Note D.
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