Rights Talk in Canada in the Late Nineteenth Century: “The Good Sense and Right Feeling of the People”

Abstract

I am a friend to the preservation of the rights of property…but I believe in the subordination of those rights to the public good…. I deny that the people of my Province are insensible to or careless about the true principles of legislation. I believe they are thoroughly alive to them, and I am content that my rights of property, humble though they are, and those of my children, shall belong to the Legislature of my country to be disposed of subject to the good sense and right feeling of the people of that Province.Edward Blake made this declaration about property in 1882. Presumably his beliefs were widely shared by Canadian lawyers, for he was the leader of the Liberal party, the Treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada (Ontario), and one of the leading counsel. We seek to explore his beliefs and to reconstruct the understandings of rights in late nineteenth-century Canada, and especially the understandings of common-law lawyers.