other human beings? These questions involve nothing recondite. Their difficulty, if they have any, lies in their simplicity. Pretty much all that one man can do for another towards solving them is to present them clearly and ask, “What do you think?”
In treating these questions, George argues little and refines not at all. In his various writings he presents his views in different forms, but always as though he considers what he says to be self-evident so soon as attention is fixed upon it. Natural rights, he thinks, spring from and are testified to by the natural facts of individual organization, — “the fact that each particular pair of hands obey a particular brain and are related to a particular stomach; the fact that each man is a definite, coherent, independent whole.”[1] He declines argument with those who assert that all rights spring from the grant of the sovereign political power, and that none are natural, and he quotes the Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Federal Constitution, and the French Declaration of Rights as true descriptions of natural rights and of the subordination of government thereto.[2] As to the right to land, he says (referring specifically to Ireland): “Since, then, all the Irish people have the same equal right to life, it follows that they must all have the same equal right to the land of Ireland. If they are all in Ireland by the same equal permission of nature, so that no one of them can justly set up a superior claim to life than any other one of them, so that all the rest of them could not justly say to any one of them, ‘You have not the same right to live as we have; therefore we will pitch you out of Ireland into the sea,’ then they must all have the same equal right to the elements which nature has provided for the sustaining of life, — to air, to water, and to land; for to deny the equal right to the elements necessary to the maintaining of life, is to deny the equal right to life. Any law that said, ‘Certain babies have no right to the soil of Ireland; therefore they shall be thrown off the soil of Ireland,’ would be precisely equivalent to a law that said, ‘Certain babies have no right to live; therefore they shall be thrown into the sea.’ And as no law or custom or agreement can justify the denial of the equal right to life, so no law or custom or agreement can justify the denial of the equal right to land. It therefore follows from the very fact of their existence that the right of each one of the people of
