The Exercise of Personal Rights — Must Also Respect the Rights of Others — What We Owe to God
Direct an Individual Matter
MAN owes first allegiance to his Maker. Daniel Webster declared that his greatest thought was that of man’s personal responsibility to God. God regards the individual man. All the commands, injunctions, and promises of the Bible go first to the individual. Upon him rests the moral obligation. The God-given privileges, rights, and liberties of the race vest first in the individual; for only so are the rights of the many conserved. In the liberty of the exercise of these rights, God has at various times clearly manifested that He stood with the individual against the mass that sought to deprive him of his heritage.
OUR NEIGHBOR’S LIBERTIES
But the exercise of man’s rights in his duty to God does not trench upon nor invalidate the equal rights and liberties of his neighbor. The same God who commands us to love Him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength demands also that we love our neighbor as ourselves, and that whatsoever we would that men should do to us, we should do to them. Matt. 22: 34-40; 7: 12.
Clearly, therefore, a proper view of personal rights and liberties does not mean that the individual may do as he pleases in his relationship to his fellows. Liberty is not license.
PURELY INDIVIDUAL MATTERS
For example, a man may stand or sit or kneel at public worship. He does not in this necessarily wrong his neighbor in any way. He may religiously observe the first day of the week, or the seventh, or any other day of the week, or no day. This is a matter wholly between himself and God. He may be sprinkled, poured, or immersed, or refuse to submit to any of these ordinances, when he unites with the particular church or denomination of his choice. That is a matter of conscience. He may believe in the “real presence,” or refuse to believe in it. He may remove his hat in honor to a passing procession, or refuse so to do. He injures the life, chastity, property, or reputation of no one by so doing or refraining from doing. He may wear white clothes, gray clothes, black or blue clothes. By this his neighbor or society is not wronged, though its ultra-fashionables may be shocked. These rights of the individual should be safeguarded by law, for only so are the rights of all conserved. But his liberties go no farther than his God-given rights extend; and therefore these liberties should not encroach upon the equal rights of his fellows.
THE BUTLER BRICKYARDS, HOUSTON, TEXAS, FOLLOWING A HURRICANE WHICH PASSED THROUGH THAT CITY AUGUST 16.
Jefferson well expressed the thought of personal rights in a letter to Francis W. Gilmer, dated June 17, 1816: “No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him. Every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having a natural right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.”
Between himself and God, therefore, man has the personal, full, and free liberty to do as his conscience directs, provided he does not trench upon or interfere with the equal rights of his fellow man. And that is true in a general sense in our duties toward the world. The rights of our fellows must be respected. Our rights are coequal and coextensive with theirs, theirs with ours. A man may eat and drink what and how he will so far as the mere act is concerned. But if his eating or drinking affects the rights of others, his liberties, or the opportunity to exercise them, must in justice be restricted.
THE WIFE AND THE CHILDREN HAVE RIGHTS
One of the duties that a husband owes his wife and family is proper support if he is able to render it. That is a civil obligation that man takes upon himself; but when he takes the income that he and his family need, and uses it for drink, thus destroying his own efficiency, and laying upon the community the burden and support of his family, which he has pauperized, he passes over the line of personal liberty, and is a transgressor. When he sells to others poison, which unmans them, beggaring their families, debasing the neighborhood, and disgracing his own family, his business and “liberties” become damaging to others, and ought to be suppressed. When his business results in pauperism, imbecility, disease, dishonesty, crime, it ought, in justice to society, to be prohibited. The Central Board of Labor in Pasadena has stated the fact of relationship between a man and his family strongly and simply. This board sent out, in 1914, an appeal to the members of trade-unions in California, and among other good things, said:
“It is urged by the defenders of liquor that prohibition is an invasion of ‘personal liberty.’ This claim is most absurd. From where or when has any workingman, who earns only too little at best, acquired the personal liberty to spend any of his meager wage on intoxicating drinks while his wife’s and children’s shoes and clothes are worn to the last frazzle, and his last month’s rent is unpaid? Ask the women. No, brothers; our wages are not big enough to go around, even without wasting any money for drink.”
WHAT THE COURTS SAY OF THE SALOON
Here are also utterances from the various supreme courts in the country, regarding the personal liberties of the saloon men:587
“A saloon license is a mere permit. The privilege of keeping a saloon is a derivative right, springing alone from the provisions of the license statute.”—Supreme Court of Indiana.
The United States Circuit Court of Alabama, January 18, 1909, in the case of F. W. Cooke Brewing Company versus Garber, 168 Fed. 942, declared: “In the case at hand, no property right whatever is involved, if the prohibition statute be valid. So long as the state recognizes the right to make and vend intoxicating liquors, that occupation is under the protection of the law; but even then, it is at most a mere license to carry on an occupation which may be revoked at the arbitrary wish of the legislature at any time. If the legislature chooses to outlaw the occupation, there is no right of property in the business in which the owner is protected by the constitution and laws either of the state or of the United States.”
“The licensed saloon keeper does not sell liquor by reason of an inalienable right, inherent in citizenship, but because the government has delegated to him the exercise of such rights.”—Supreme Court of South Carolina.
Other courts speak to the same effect. According to their opinions, then, the same authority that licenses a business has the power and right to prohibit the same.
THE SUMMARY
Summing it all up, then, no man has the right to make himself a brute and a burden upon society.
No man has the right to spend for drink that which he owes to his family.
No man has the right to beggar his family for the benefit of the liquor seller.
No man has the right to destroy or worse than destroy millions of bushels of good grain, to manufacture a poison to sell which brings disease, disorder, crime, corruption, madness, death.
No man has the right to sell his neighbor drink, and thus impoverish that neighbor and his family.
No man has the right to sell to others that which destroys their efficiency in war and peace, morally, mentally, physically.
No man has the right to conduct a business from which comes no good, but from which spring political corruption, poverty, pauperism, idiocy, insanity, disease, death, crime, blasting, and blighting, only and always.
No man has the right to conduct a business that, to make it a continued success, must depend upon the destruction of the youth of the land.
And therefore, in short, justice to the state, justice to the taxpayers, justice to society, justice to the wife and children of the drunkard, justice to future generations — nay, more, justice to the drunkard himself, and to the equal rights of all — demands that the liquor traffic shall be totally and forever abolished. M. C. W.
