"‘Natural rights’...[is not] a true way of putting things—and certainly not the most useful and fertile way. Nature [is] simply the mastery of the strongest [and confers no rights on man]. Two savage tribes contend for a tract of land of wh[ich] they are in need for their subsistence: nature gave the right to this land to the tribe wh[ich] was strong enough to thrash the other. No right is worth a straw apart from the good that it brings: and all claims to rights must depend—not upon nature—but upon the good that the said rights are calculated to bring to the greatest number. General utility, public expediency, the greatest happiness of the greatest number—these are the tests and standards of a right; not the dictate of nature."
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John Morley to Joseph Chamberlain after Chamberlain delivered a speech in which he said that the propertied classes must pay a ‘ransom’ for holding property in violation of ‘natural rights’ (6 January 1885), quoted in D. A. Hamer, Lord Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (1968), p. 153
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Natural rights
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