INALIENABLE OR NATURAL RIGHTS.
OUR Legislatures are not sufficiently apprised of the rightful limits of their power—that their true office is to declare and enforce only our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the7equal rights of another; and this is all from which the law ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of society; and this is all that the law should enforce on him; and, no man having the 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 all their functions, and the idea is quite unfounded that, on entering into society, we give up any natural right.—Jefferson’s Views on the Doctrine of Natural Rights, in a letter to Francis W. Gilmer, dated at Monticello, June 7, 1816.