Neither man nor his community possesses any absolute rights; they are all conditioned on how they are exercised.  If they are not so conditioned they become privilege, which is a right not subject to conditions, and privilege is one of the things republicanism and democracy and every other effort towards human emancipation have set themselves up to destroy.  Even the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is conditioned by the manner of use, and the same is true of every other and unspecified right.  I do not propose to speak here of more than one aspect of this self-evident truth, but the single instance I cite is one that bears closely on the question of our industrial and economic situation; it is the responsibility to society of property or capital on the one hand and of labour on the other, when both invoke their “rights” to justify them in oppressing the general public in the pursuit of their own natural interests.

During the Middle Ages, just as the political theory maintained that while a king ruled by divine right, this right gave him no authority to govern wrong, so the social theory held that while a man had a right to private property he had no right to use it against society, nor could the labourer use his own rights to the injury of the same institution.  Power, property and labour must be used as a function, i.e., “an activity which embodies and expresses the idea of social purpose.”  Unless I am mistaken, this is at the basis of our “common law.”

As Mediaevalism gave place to the Renaissance this Christian idea was abandoned, and increasingly the obligation was severed from the right, which so became that odious thing, privilege.  Intolerable in its injustice and oppression, this privilege, which by the middle of the eighteenth century had become the attribute of the aristocracy, was completely overthrown, in France first of all, and a new doctrine of rights was enunciated and put in operation.  Unfortunately the result was in essence simply a transforming of privilege from one body to another, for the old conception of social purpose, as the necessary concomitant of acknowledged rights, did not emerge from the shadows of the Middle Ages; it had been too long forgotten.  The new “rights” were exclusively individualistic, in practice, though in the minds of the idealists who formulated them, they had their social aspect.  Their promulgation synchronized with the sudden rise and violent expansion of industrialism, and as one country after another followed the lead of England in accepting the new system, they hardened into an iron-clad scheme for the defence of property and the free action of the holders and manipulators of property.  Backed by the economic philosophy of Locke, Adam Smith, Bentham and the Manchester School, generally, and the evolutionary theories of the exponents of Darwinism, and abetted by an endless series of statutes, the idea of the exemption of property holders from any responsibility to society for the use of their property, became a fixed part of the mental equipment of modernism.  Precisely the same thing happened politically and socially.  Rights were personal and implied no necessary obligation to society as a whole; they were personal attributes and as such to be defended at all costs.