Origin of Rights

we must believe that men had naturally no right to pick up cockles on the beach, or gather berries from the hedge-no right to cultivate the earth, to invent and make comfortable clothing, to use instruments to provide more easily for their enjoyments-no right to improve and adorn their habitations-nay, no right to have habitations-no right to buy or sell, or move from place to place-till the benevolent and wise law-giver conferred all these rights on them.  If the principle be true in one case it must be universally true; and, according to it, parents had no right to love and respect their offspring, and infants no right to draw nourishment from the breast of their mothers, until the legislator-foreseeing, fore calculating the immense advantages to the human race of establishing the long list of rights and duties which grow out of our affections, and constitute our happiness-had established them by his decree.

Thomas Hodgskin, The Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted, 1832