Of the rights that the Supreme Being developed when creating the world, these rights were allocated to human beings: Each human being along with life will receive feelings. No one will be given a perfect life. The lives of all human beings will grow and decrease gradually. Also the feelings of all human beings will be to a measure: they may increase to a certain extent from where they may either disappear or be forced to decrease. Only with an increase of feelings will the activities of human beings expand.
Human beings must be born, grow, become old and die. Each person will experience pain and pleasure. Through feelings, each person will become a necessary objective of activity for all the surrounding beings. The operation of external beings which is conducive to maintaining human life will cause pleasant feelings in the person, namely bliss. The operation of external beings which is contrary to human life will cause pain.
In pain and in the face of death, every person must try to maintain his life.
The fruits of the earth and sleep are necessary to stay alive. Each person will have senses to recognise the operation of external beings which is conducive to human life and to avoid the operation of those beings who are harmful to human life. No person will be allowed to understand the essence of external objects: each person with his senses will receive feelings that are the effects of the operation of external beings. Among the received feelings, every person will have a memory and will be able to make images thereof. External images will affect human will to the same extent as internal feelings. Each person will be able to imitate with ease but to think with difficulty.
Human beings are not only required to maintain their own lives but also to multiply their tribe. The feelings of one person will stir the senses of another person and awaken reciprocal feelings. The pain of a suffering person will cause pain in another person.
Each human being will have the power of expressing his feelings to other persons through speech and to pass on his impressions. In order to defend and to use these properties or rights, each human being will be provided with strength and intellect. No one shall have the strength or intellect to deprive others of these rights. Therefore, more strength and a better intellect will not be permanent or hereditary in one family and will remain only as a temporary feature of a person.
Stanisław Staszic, Warnings for Poland
Therefore each person will be born weak and for a long time in childhood will remain infirm in strength and intellect. With age, strength and intellect will mature. But these will be taken away by sleep every few hours – and soon, like in childhood in the past, old age will weaken people again [...].
So people are equal as to all rights while not all are equal as to the use of rights. The inequality gives them common needs and each person is compelled to live in company. The inequality may never extend so far that one person could deprive another of such rights or a minority could deprive a majority of such rights and use them for themselves. Personal strength and intellect in each person differ with age, time and passion and are subject to illness; they need rest every so many hours, become weaker in old age and end in death.
However, the common strength and intellect of a society or a majority of people are constant, never varying, subject to no age or illness, always competent. Like human rights, they are immortal. The strength and intellect of a majority of people are therefore an invincible fortress of human rights that the Supreme Creator of the rights has established Himself [...].
Equality, freedom and ownership are the most necessary and straight-forward resultant from human rights. No one is born with an inseparable privilege of doing nothing and being rich or an unchanged destiny to work and be poor. All riches available to people are in the earth. Without a major violation no one can be prohibited to acquire title to land. The law or the right to use personal property allows each person to hold title to land.
No one is born with a stigma of serfdom, unkindness, contempt and shame of life, just as no one is born with a privilege of nobility, domination, respect and honour. It is only usefulness that makes people different [...].
Human beings are made to live in company. The objective of people living in company is to secure the law of nature. Each person in the company promises not to use personal strength and intellect to defend his rights but will apply all his strength and intellect to defend the company.
The company in turn guarantees each person the defence of his rights and the freedom to use all property in accordance with the laws. The rules of the company for people living in any climate do not change natural human rights since the climate only decreases or increases feelings in people. Such a change only results in changes of the constitution of government, civil rights, rewards and punishment [...].
The highest power and will or the highest sovereignty exists in the nation.
Such power and will were established by the Creator Himself. Therefore, only such power comes from God as the nation explicitly provides. Human freedom consists in free use of property in accordance with the law. The law within a community is the result of common will. Common will is
Human Rights: An Anthology of Texts
a collection of the will of everybody. Each citizen can participate either directly or through a deputy in establishing laws.
The law that is the result of common will may prohibit only such activities as are harmful to the law of everybody or the community. Unanimity is the best manifestation of common will. A second manifestation of common will is the consent of two thirds of the nation.
Thus, a simple majority may often prove to be a deceitful manifestation of common will. Violation of common will occurs when only one third of a nation acts against two thirds or when a third part prohibits the other two thirds from acting. The smaller the third part, the more material the violation is.
The most outrageous violation occurs when one land, one province, one person constricts the will of dozens of lands, provinces or millions of people.
This occurs most often when lack of knowledge makes only out of unanimity the manifestation of common will.
Common strength and will are attributed to each nation so that no nation may deprive itself of them. In a community each verdict of the personal will of one person, one family or a number of families is not the law but a violation of the law. In a community, law is violated by all those classes, families or that one family that would claim that birth gave them more rights than to other people, that it or they only have the power of dominating other people, granting rights to them, designating their property, happiness, peace, selling them, transferring them to another master, exchanging or giving as a dowry.
Political fraudsters are all those families or that one family that would argue that God has given just them supreme power and intellect above other millions of people, that it is only their intellect and will that are infallible, that they are inseparable from the real good of those millions of people, never subject to any personality, any passions or weaknesses of the flesh. This is only an opinion, this is only false and generally imposed images on all people may treat seriously the robbery of common will by the violator. Therefore, every person should be free to speak, write, print, pass on opinions to other people just like every person is free to use their thoughts, personal property as long as no harm is done to the rights of other people [...].
The highest power and will of the nation are inseparable. A nation with highest will without highest power would be like a paralytic; a nation with highest power without highest will would be like a stupid person. All magistrates, each civil servant in a country is a tool without any other power than that which is provided to them by the highest power. The highest power may not be transferred as a whole and obviously may not grant power that is larger than itself.
Stanisław Staszic, Warnings for Poland
It is abhorrent to politics and not good government when a civil servant whose duty is to watch that the law is observed has more power than the legislator, where a king has sometimes more power than the common power and will. The highest magistrate power may only grant such power to those who implement the rights that would never pose a hazard to the freedom of the community and that would always be a threat of particular violence [...].
It is only common will which may institute courts, grant power to them and describe methods of trial and studies to determine if the evidence of the complainant is true while the law itself will specify the punishment. There is no equality, freedom or ownership where human rights are violated, where one citizen has the power of designating judges for his own co-citizens.
Human rights are in constant danger where one magistrate elects judges for the whole country. Human equality and freedom require that judges are elected by the citizens whom they will judge. A court verdict may be nothing else but the provisions of the law itself. […]
Internal defence of citizens’ rights against other citizens should be arranged in such a manner that it never appears dangerous to the freedom of the community. And it proved dangerous to each citizen that the person harmed with the verdict was devoid of reward, property and peace. The common strength of the nation shall be the external defence. This may not be transferred to anyone.
The threat to human rights should be defended by citizens of their own country. Defence of a country is the protection of human rights, citizens’
freedom and property. So defence of the country may not offer a chance to harm these rights. The defence which becomes stronger than the strength of the whole nation may be used against the freedom of that nation, that is against human freedoms, that deprives it of personal property and destroys land ownership that – when destroyed – leaves nothing to defend; such, I say, defence is nothing else but a tool of violation and a defence of tyranny.
Such defence of the community violates personal ownership, imposes eternal concern in the souls of parents and children in the whole country that may not be preserved without forcing not all but only some citizens to leave their homes, parents, relatives and property forever; to renounce the inborn likings, the selected way of living and the freedom to use human rights. Such a defence of the country destroys land ownership that is contrary to the common will of the nation but in line with the increasing defence of a neighbouring country or due to the particular ambitions of one family is forced to grow and takes away all benefits from owning property, leaving them only with work and poverty.
The regular and standing army may not act solely as defenders of slavery and despotism: they may not apply their growth and immeasurable needs to human rights, to citizens’ ownership and freedoms but they apply human
Human Rights: An Anthology of Texts
rights, citizens’ freedom and ownership to themselves. In accordance with God’s laws, it is only the common power of the nation granted out of the will of the nation, that is only the citizens themselves who are natural defenders of their rights, freedom and property. Therefore, the way to wage a war should not be based on art but on the power and courage of men [...].
The rights of the nation are equal to human rights taken together. Just as from nature every person has intellect and strength to defend his rights without depriving others, equally each nation should be free to use its power and intellect to defend its rights without depriving other nations of them.
Just as in a community, it is the citizen who violates the rights of others and attributes more rights to himself and similarly in nations it is the family or that nation that violates the rights of others and appropriates more rights to itself than to others.
War is an act of God and is in agreement with God’s orders when it is aimed at saving mankind. War is the only method the Supreme Legislator has given people to defend their rights, to rid themselves of violators.
Only such wars are fair and just that defend human rights.
Rights of nations are violated by every despot since wherever despotism exists, republics have a difficult time to survive in the neighbourhood.
Rights of nations are violated by all those families, all those individuals who seize for themselves the sole legislative power; rights of nations are violated by that family, that community that keeps a regular army as it gives a hundred thousand people more power through craft than God has given to millions.
Rights of nations are violated by that family or those families who dare call people their property in the same manner they refer to land, cattle and other creatures.
Rights of nations are violated by the duke [king, emperor], any person, any public servant who dares force with weapons other people, other villages, towns, province, nation to stay under his rule when those people, that village, town, province, nation find happiness for themselves under another ruler.
Rights of nations are violated by the duke [king, emperor] who wages war on another country to seize it or to steal a province from it without shame justifying the war with the most disgraceful ground that those millions come in his wife’s dowry or are inherited after a grandmother or uncle.
All those families, whatever their name, are conspirators against the rights of nations who plot in order to split nations among them, who sell, trade, wage wars for and after such wars in result of agreements split among them millions of people like themselves, grant to themselves, exchange one nation for another. No person or assembly is empowered to decide about the slavery of some of their co-citizens. This is only subject to the free agreement of the people whose freedom is at stake. A legal parliament only may expel
Stanisław Staszic, Warnings for Poland
a part of nation from its community but is not empowered to sell it into slavery. Anyone who dares do that commits a crime against mankind. One man may not be owned by another.
Today all land that has been divided and occupied is in the rightful possession of those who cultivate it. Therefore, today the only just reason for a war is the integrity of the rights of nations. Those wars are unjust that are waged for any other reason than to save the rights of nations or to restore to any people their inborn freedom to form a community with anyone of their own free will or to elect a government as they like.
Wars may not be waged to seize for whatever reason any land since such land belongs to those people who settled there first. Wars may neither be waged to take the power of other people since people are not cattle to become the property of other people. Each war should be ended to give such people an opportunity to become free, to join in a community with those whom they like and elect a government of their choice.