Beacon Lights of History, Volume 11
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 11
American Founders
Book Excerpt
ain legal privileges
which the Empire had conferred upon Roman citizenship, not for any
rights which he could claim as a human being. If the Roman laws
recognized any rights, it was those which the State had given, not those
which are innate and inalienable, and which the State could not justly
take away. I apprehend that even in the Greek and Roman republics no
civil rights could be claimed except those conferred upon men as
citizens rather than as human beings. Slaves certainly had no rights,
and they composed half the population of the old Roman world. Rights
were derived from decrees or laws, not from human consciousness.
Where then did Jefferson get his ideas as to the equal rights to which men were born? Doubtless from the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, especially from Rousseau, who, despite his shortcomings as a man, was one of the most original thinkers that his century produced, and one of the most influential in shaping the opinions of civilized Europe. In his "Contrat Social" Rou
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