ABSTRACT
The first and historically the most interesting and important attempt to resist political absolutism is that which asserts the existence of Natural Rights. The theory has a more vigorous form, exemplified in Locke, which gives the State the positive duty of preserving these rights, but this advance leads at once to difficulties, for preservation and infringement are clearly inseparable. The first and historically the most interesting and important attempt to resist political absolutism is that which asserts the existence of Natural Rights. Fortunately, however, the niceties of the theory need not detain the reader if the people attack it at its roots, and there it is most clearly vulnerable. Natural Rights must be self-evident and they must be absolute if they are to be rights at all. The attempt to mitigate conditions of labor in the nail-making industry by appointing inspectors to report on them was attacked as ‘violating the sanctity of the English home’.
