The connection so shown between the growth of handicraft and the system of Natural Rights does not purport to be a complete account of the rise of that system, even in outline. The more usual account traces this system to the concept of _jus naturale_, of the late Roman jurists. There is assuredly no call here to question or disparage the work of those jurists and scholars who have busied themselves with authenticating the system of Natural Rights by showing it to be founded in the _jus gentium_ and the _jus naturale_ of the Latin Codes. Their work is doubtless historically exact and competent. But as is commonly the case with such work at the hands of jurists and scholars, especially in that past age, it contents itself with tracing an authentic pedigree, rather than go into questions of the causes that led to the vogue of these concepts at the time of their acceptance or the circumstances which gave these Natural Rights that particular scope and content which they have assumed in modern theory of law and civil relations. The thesis which is here offered is to the effect that the habituation of use and wont under the handicraft system installed these rights, in an inchoate fashion, in the current preconceptions of the community, and that this habituation is traceable, causally rather than by process of ratiocination, to the sense of workmanship as it took form and went into action under the particular conventional circumstances of the early era of handicraft; that the preconceptions that so went into effect determined the current attitude of thoughtful men toward questions of civil rights and legal principle; and that the jurists who had occasion to take notice of these current preconceptions touching human rights found themselves constrained to deal with them as elementary facts in the situation as it lay before them, and therefore to find a ground for them in the accepted canons, such as would satisfy the legal mind of their authenticity by ancient prescription, or such as should determine the scope of their application in conformity with legal principles having a prior claim and authoritative sanction. The thesis, therefore, is not that the jurists founded these modern principles of legal theory on the popular prejudices current in their time and due in point of habituation to the routine of handicraft, nor that they stretched the ancient principles of _jus naturale_ to meet the demands of popular prejudice, but that on prompting of legal exigencies to which the practical acceptance of these principles had given rise, the jurists found in the capitularies of the code what was necessary to authenticate these principles of legal theory and give them the sanction of authority,--a work of reasoning all the more congenial and convincing to the jurists since they in common with the rest of their generation were by habit and tradition imbued with the penchant to find these principles right and good, and consequently to