Lastly, it is not true that all rights,
notably rights of property, are the creation of the State. A man is a
man first and a citizen afterwards. As a man, he has certain rights
actual and potential (c. v., s. i., p. 244): these the State exists,
not to create, for they are prior to it in the order of nature, but to
determine them, where indeterminate, to sanction and to safeguard
them.
Natural rights go before legal rights, and are presupposed to them, as
the law of nature before that law which is civil and positive. It is
an "idol of the tribe" of lawyers to ignore all law but that upon
which their own professional action takes its stand.
3. "In considering man as he must have come from the hands of nature,"
writes Jean Jacques Rousseau, "I behold an animal less strong than
some, less active than others, but upon the whole in organism having
the advantage of them all. I behold him appeasing his hunger under an
oak, slaking his thirst in the first brook, finding a bed at the foot
of the same tree that furnished his repast, and there you have all his
cravings satisfied." (_Discours sur l'origine de l'inegalite _.
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