to his merits and faculties; and an altruistic one, by virtue of which he recognizes the right of others to such benefits as may be due to their merits or may flow from a proper use of their faculties. These two elements Mr. Spencer also calls positive and negative—the former positive, as putting forward positive claims; the latter negative, as implying a restraint upon natural liberty.
Another important distinction which Mr. Spencer makes is between the ethics of the family and the ethics of the state. In the family the young have to be cared for, and, in their case, benefits have to be proportioned, not to merits, but to needs, which, in a certain sense, may be described as lack of merits; in other words, the less a child can do that is beneficial to others the more care and attention it must receive. The state, on the other hand, deals with adults, and its guiding principle therefore should be exclusively—benefits according to merits, evils according to demerits. Only confusion and trouble can arise, according to Mr. Spencer, from applying the ethics of the family to state action. He is willing that individuals should exercise a prudent benevolence if they will, but he sees no reason why the state should ever depart from the strictest rule of justice. In discussing The Constitution of the State and the question of giving women the suffrage, he makes the following significant remarks: "Human beings at large, as at present constituted, are far too much swayed by special emotions temporarily excited and not held in check by the aggregate of other emotions; and women are carried away by the feelings of the moment more than men are. This characteristic is at variance with that judicial-mindedness which should guide the making of laws. . . . At present both men and women are led by their feelings to vitiate the ethics of the state by introducing the ethics of the family. But it is especially in the nature of women, as a concomitant of their maternal functions, to yield benefits not in proportion to deserts, but in proportion to the absence of deserts—to give most where capacity is least. . . . The present tendency of both sexes is to contemplate citizens as having claims in proportion to their needs—their needs being habitually proportionate to their demerits; and this tendency, stronger in women than in men, must, if it operates politically, cause a more general fostering of the worse at the expense of the better." These are weighty words, and we can not but hope they may not be entirely inoperative on the minds of modern legislators.
On the subject of political rights our author does not strike at all a popular key. In the chapter entitled Political Rights—so called, he says that such rights are not, strictly speaking, rights at all. A man's substantial rights are, he says, the right to physical integrity, the right to free motion and locomotion, the right to the use of natural media, the right of property, the right of incorporeal property, the right of gift and bequest, the right of free exchange and free contract, the right of free industry, the right of free belief and worship, and the right of free speech and publication. As to political rights, they are merely the supposed means of obtaining the above real rights; and serious mischiefs have resulted from confusing them with real rights. It has been assumed that where political rights were possessed by all, the liberty of all would be secure; but, far from this being the case, we can not fail to observe that, "where so-called political rights are possessed by all, rights properly so called are often unscrupulously trampled upon." For example, "universal suffrage does not prevent the corruptions of municipal governments, which impose heavy local taxes and do very inefficient work, . . . does not prevent citizens from being coerced in their private lives by dictating what they shall not drink; does not prevent an enormous
