Also whether he can
prove that his life is a pleasure to himself or a benefit to
anyone else, and whether it is good for him to be encouraged to
exaggerate the importance of his short span in this vale of tears
rather than to keep himself constantly ready to meet his God.
The only reason for not raising these very weighty points is that
we find society unworkable except on the assumption that every man
has a natural right to live. Nothing short of his own refusal to
respect that right in others can reconcile the community to
killing him. From this fundamental right many others are derived.
The American Constitution, one of the few modern political
documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest
circumstances to think out what they really had to face instead of
chopping logic in a university classroom, specifies "liberty and
the pursuit of happiness" as natural rights. The terms are too
vague to be of much practical use; for the supreme right to life,
extended as it now must be to the life of the race, and to the
quality of life as well as to the mere fact of breathing, is
making short work of many ancient liberties, and exposing the
pursuit of happiness as perhaps the most miserable of human
occupations.
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