dividuals and the state are regulated through the creation of strict legal rights, duties, liberties and powers, determined and enforced or recognized by the authorities of the state.

§ 6. Moral rights and duties.-Care must be taken to distinguish between legal rights and duties and moral rights and duties. While it is believed and hoped that there is a close agreement between the two, there is no necessary relationship. The two are separate and distinct, the latter belonging wholly to the realm of ethics or religion, with which we are not here directly concerned. It may be one's moral duty to give his starving neighbor food, but one is under no legal obligation to do so and the neighbor has no legal right. This is but one of the many relationships for which the state has established no legal obligation. As Professor Amos says: "A man may be a bad husband, a bad father, a bad guardian, without violating a law. He may be an extortionate landlord, a wasteful tenant, a hard dealer, an unreliable tradesman, and law can not touch him. He may be a rascally politician, a demagogue, an indolent aristocrat, and yet satisfy to the utmost the claims of the law."

A right resting upon the law of the state can be enforced or vindicated by a court, and such a right. implies a legal obligation to do or forbear. A right resting upon moral or social laws may be valuable and its transgression may cause pain, suffering and discomfort, but it can not be enforced or vindicated by a court or by any positive sanction. It is the province of courts and lawyers to deal with rights of legal obligation alone.

§ 7. Scope of legal right.-As above indicated, the

law does not enforce every moral duty or protect every moral right. It is thought unwise for the state to interfere too minutely with the affairs of its citizens, and the policy of the law is to recognize only such rights and duties as experience seems to show that the necessities of the public welfare require. In order that the reader may at the beginning get some idea of the nature and scope of the rights protected by the law, a brief summary of some of the more fundamental legal rights is given in the succeeding sections.

§ 8. The right of personal security.—The right of personal security is the most important of all rights and it consists in a person's legal and uninterrupted enjoyment, (a) of the right to life, (b) of the right to limbs, body, etc., (c) right to the preservation of health, (d) the right to one's reputation, (e) the right of free speech and locomotion.

§ 9. The right to life.-The right to life begins with the first pulsations in the unborn child. It is everywhere a moral wrong, and in most civilized countries it is a legal wrong to destroy human life, even in its first manifestations. The right to life implies the right to preserve it, and from this springs the right of self-defense, a right recognized by the law. Besides the right of the individual to repel a deadly assault by taking the life of his assailant, society has the right to punish with death any one who unlawfully takes the life of another. Blackstone and the earlier writers base the moral right of capital punishment upon the Mosaic law, but the better view now is that it has always rested upon grounds of public policy and can only be justified when and because

it is necessary for the preservation and security of society.

§ 10. The right of personal liberty.—The right of personal liberty is secured by that provision of the Constitution which declares that "No person * * shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law." "The meaning of this is," as Webster said in his speech in the Dartmouth College case, "that every citizen shall hold his life, liberty, property and immunities under the protection of general rules which govern society." This term “liberty" is, as has been said, a negative term denoting the absence of restraint. But it is more-it implies the right to think, to speak, to act individually or with others, to labor for one's support without molestation from others; it means the right to the full exercise of one's faculties in lawful ways. Civil liberty, which is here meant, is liberty restrained so far as is necessary for the common good. Any interference with such liberty is a legal wrong.

§ 11. Habeas corpus. To prevent unlawful invasions of the right to liberty the English habeas corpus act of the year 1679 has been re-enacted generally in the American States. The writ is an order of court directed to a person detaining another, commanding him to produce the body of the prisoner before the court or judge, to determine the legality of his commitment. To further secure the right the Constitution of the United States declares that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in case of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." The writ lies for the liberation of a prisoner held for an act which does not constitute any

offense known to the law, or a prisoner sentenced by a court without jurisdiction, or detained in prison after a pardon has been granted. The law also gives one who is unlawfully restrained of his liberty a civil action against the wrongdoer.

§ 12. Right to health.-The right to the preservation and enjoyment of health is protected and enforced by suitable laws. No one has the right to do anything which will impair the health of another. To create or maintain a nuisance by carrying on a noisome trade in a thickly populated neighborhood, to the discomfort of, or to the injury of the health of the citizens, would, where the wrong was sufficient to amount to a public nuisance, be punished by the criminal law, and if the injury is confined to one or only a few of the citizens, they have a right of action in which damages for the injury may be recovered from one who creates or maintains the nuisance, and in a proper case the courts will interfere by injunction and. prohibit its continuance.

Various statutory and constitutional provisions exist in the different states for the establishment of local boards of health, which have broad administrative and executive functions. Among the principal laws and ordinances pertaining to health are those concerning the quarantine of contagious diseases, the disinfection of exposed property, the vaccination of school children and adults to prevent epidemics, the maintenance of public hospitals, and the suppression of nuisances and offensive occupations.

§ 13. Right to reputation.-The right to one's reputation is protected and enforced by the laws on the subject of libel and slander and malicious prosecution.

To write and publish anything of another which is false, and which either charges a crime or holds one up to public scorn or ridicule, is libelous, and subjects the author to an action for damages, and in many states to a criminal prosecution also. To say falsely of a man that he has been guilty of a crime which would subject him to infamous punishment, or to say falsely of a woman that she is unchaste, is slander, and the injured party may recover damages of the offender in a civil action. To charge a man falsely before a magistrate with the commission of a crime with malice and without probable cause is malicious. prosecution for which in a proper case damages will be awarded to the injured party.

§ 14. Right to property.-The right of property is secured by the fifth amendment to the Constitution of the United States which provides that: "No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law," and by the fourteenth amendment, which provides that: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The right of property is the right of dominion, ownership, possession. Law writers have different theories of the origin of this right. Blackstone says, "The earth and all things therein were the general property of mankind from the immediate gift of the Creator. * * By the law of nature and reason, he who first began to use it (property) ́ acquired therein a kind of transient property that lasted as