a father, husband, son, or brother, and therefore cannot extinguish the rights which are necessarily involved in his so acting and being so treated. Nor can it prevent him from appropriating things and from associating with others on the understanding that they respect each other's appropriations, and thus possessing and exercising rights of property. He has thus rights which the state neither gives nor can take away, and they amount to or constitute a right to freedom in the sense explained. The state, under which the slave is a slave, refusing to recognise this right, he is not limited in its exercise by membership of the state. He has a right to assert his right to such membership in any way compatible with that susceptibility to the claims of human fellowship on which the right rests. Other men have claims upon him, conditioning his rights, but the state, as such, which refuses to recognise his rights, has no claim on him. The obligation to observe the law, because it is the law, does not exist for him. 146. It is otherwise with the citizen. The slave has a claim upon him to be treated in a certain way, the claim which is properly described as that of a common humanity. But the state which forbids him so to treat the slave has also a claim upon him, a claim which embodies many of the claims that arise out of a common humanity in a form that reconciles them with each other. Now it may be argued that the claim of the state is only absolutely paramount on the supposition that in its commands and prohibitions it takes account of all the claims that arise out of human fellowship; that its authority over the individual is in principle the authority of those claims, taken as a whole; that if, as in the case supposed, its ordinances conflict with those claims as possessed by a certain class of persons, their authority, which is essentially a conditional or derived authority, disappears; that a disregard of them in the interest of the claims which they disregard is really conformity to the requirements of the state according to its true end or idea, since it interferes with none of the claims or interests which the state has its value in maintaining or protecting, but, on the contrary, forces on the attention of members of the state claims which they hitherto disregarded; and that if the conscience of the citizens is so far mastered by the special private interests which the institution of slavery breeds that it cannot be brought to recognise action on the slave's behalf as contributory to a common good, yet there is no ground under such conditions for considering a man's fellow-citizens to be the sole organs of the recognition which is needed to render his power of action a right; that the needful recognition is at any rate forthcoming from the slave, and from all those acquainted with the action in whom the idea of a good common to each man with others operates freely.