What is human right? Apart from formally admitted distinctions we shall divide what is called right from the psychological and human point of view into two categories of ideas; natural rights and conventional rights.
Natural Rights. Right of the Stronger.—Natural right is quite a relative idea: the right to life and its conditions. But, as in this world, which is said to be created by a personal and perfect God, things are so amicably arranged that living creatures can only exist by devouring one another, the oldest effective natural right of every living being is precisely that of devouring others weaker than itself. This is the right of the stronger. Therefore, the absolute natural right is the right of the stronger.
Rights of Groups. Ants.—These notions become altered, however, if we regard them from the point of view of relative natural right. This does not concern all living beings, but only certain groups. The rights of groups are relative from a double point of view. On the one hand they give the group of individuals concerned the right of interfering with the right to life of other groups, even to extinction. On the other hand—and this is the better aspect of the rights of groups—they are completed by what are called the duties of each individual toward others of the same group, that is to say, the obligation to have regard for and even protect their rights equally as his own. The rights of a group include the social rights and duties in the limits of that group.
It is among animals, especially the ants, that we find the most ideal organization of the rights of a group. Each individual of the ant colony acts in the interests of the community, which are the same as its own. It has the right to be nourished and housed and to satisfy all its immediate wants, but at the same time it is its duty to labor unceasingly in building and repairing the common dwelling, to nourish its fellows, to aid in the reproduction and bringing-up of the brood, to defend the community and even to take the offensive against every living being who does not belong to the community, in order to increase its resources.
The rights and duties have here become completely instinctive by adaptation, that is to say, they are performed without commands or instruction. They result spontaneously from the natural organization of ants without the least external obligation intervening. Here, the cry of distress of the ferocious human beast, of whom we have just spoken, is completely absent, for duty is replaced by instinct or by appetite, and its accomplishment is accompanied by a natural sentiment of pleasure. Every ant could be idle without being punished by its comrades, if it were capable of wishing to be so, but this is impossible. Communities of ants can only exist on the basis of the social instinct of labor and mutual support, without which they would immediately disappear.
Egoism and the Rights of Groups in Man. Human Rights.—The notions of the rights of groups in man are infinitely more complicated and more difficult to understand. As we have already seen, the most primordial instinctive sentiment in man is limited to his family and his immediate surroundings. But here even it leaves much to be desired. Family disputes, quarrels between brothers and sisters are frequent enough; parricide, fratricide and infanticide are not rare. In addition to this, beyond the narrow circle of the family, disputes, hatred between individuals, deception, robbery and many worse things are always the order of the day. In struggles between parties and classes, in the abuse of privileges of caste and fortune, in war, in commerce, in a word in everything, private interests of egoism take precedence of the general interests of humanity.
These facts, and a thousand other pitiable phenomena of the same kind in human society, bear witness to the egoistic and rapacious nature of man, which proves how little the social instinct is developed in his brain. Human society is founded much more on custom and tradition, imposed by the force of circumstances, than on nature. Human infants resemble kittens at first much more than young social beings. In primitive times, when the earth appeared large to man, the rights of groups were limited to small communities which looked upon other men, the same as animals and plants, as legitimate prey. Cannibalism and even the chase show clearly that man began by becoming more rapacious and more carnivorous than his pithecanthropoid ancestor, and his cousin the ape of the present day.
It is only later, after the progressive enlargement of stronger communities at the expense of weaker; still later, when man commenced to comprehend the sufferings for the community which result from the autocracy and passion for unlimited pleasure of a few persons; finally, when he discovered the narrow limits of the earth, that notions of humanity and humanitarianism, that is to say the sentiment of human solidarity, were able to develop in the general conscience. It was, however, one of the ancients who said "I am a man and nothing human can be strange to me." But in his time, as in that of Jesus Christ, civilization was already far advanced and influenced by the wide humanitarian ideas, more ancient still, of the Assyrians and the Buddhists.
Every one who reflects will understand that the relativity of the rights of groups in man and that of the duties which correspond to them, must in time expand and be applied, little by little, to all the human inhabitants of the earth. What is more difficult is the definition of what should be understood under the term of humanity, capable of being socialized and cultivated.
No doubt, the gap which exists between the lowest living human race and the highest ape is considerable and without direct transition. However, we gradually begin to recognize, on the one hand, that we have certain duties toward animals, at least toward those which serve us, and, on the other hand, we know that certain of the lower human races, such as the pigmies, the Veddas and even the Negroes, are inaccessible to a higher civilization, and especially incapable by themselves of maintaining what a number of their individuals learn by training when they live among us. We shall, therefore, have to choose finally between the gradual extinction of these races or that of our own.