Note 41 — Dickinson, John. Letters of Fabius on the Federal Constitution.

“The error of those who reason by precedent, drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is, that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still further into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other: but if we proceed on, at last we shall come out right: We shall then come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him——We are now got at the origin of man, and at the origin of his rights.——Every history of the creation, and every traditionary account, whether from the lettered or unlettered world, however they may vary in their opinion or belief of certain particulars, all agree in establishing one point, the unity of man; by which I mean that man is all of one degree, and consequently that all men are born equal, and with equal natural rights. By considering man in this light, it places him in a close connection with all his duties, whether to his Creator, or to the creation, of which he is a part; and it is only where he forgets his origin, or, to use a more fashionable phrase, his birth and family, that he becomes dissolute.

“Hitherto we have spoken only (and that but in part) of the natural rights of man. We have now to consider the civil rights of man, and to shew how the one originates out of the other.—Man did not enter into society, to become worse than he was before, nor to have less rights than he had before, but to have those rights better secured. His natural rights are the foundation of all his civil rights. But in order to pursue this distinction with more precision, it will be necessary to mark the different qualities of natural and civil rights.

“A few words will explain this. Natural rights are those which appertain to man in the right of his existence—civil rights are those which appertain to man in right of his being a member of society. Every civil right has for its foundation some natural right pre-existing in the individual, but to unite his individual power is not, in all cases, sufficiently competent. Of this kind are all those which relate to security and protection.

“From this short review it will be easy to distinguish between that class of natural rights which man retains after entering into society, and those which he throws into common stock as a member of society. The natural rights which he retains, are all those in which the power to execute is as perfect in the individual as the right itself.—The natural rights which are not retained, are all those in which, though the right is perfect in the individual, the power to execute them is defective: they answer not his purpose—those he deposits in the common stock of society, and takes the arm of society, of which he is a part, in preference and in addition to his own. Society grants him nothing. Every man is a proprietor in society, and draws on the capital as a matter of right.”—“Rights of Man,” 1791, page 30, 31.