"CIVIL RIGHTS are those of an individual with his government, and are summed up in the phrase, 'the rule of law,' to which even government is subject.

"It is important to emphasize, since we Americans have so parochial and impoverished a sense of history, that such civil rights can exist even in non-liberal or nondemocratic societies. Neither Henry VIII nor Tsar Nicholas I ever presumed to think he had the kind of arbitrary power which many member governments of the United Nations exercise today as a matter of course.

"As Robert Goldwin recently emphasized, we seem to have forgotten that our own broad definition of civil rights is rooted in our political and economic structure - in federalism, the separation of powers, judicial review and the diffusion of property in a private sector. In short, our civil rights derive from the theory and practice of limited government.

"Our political leaders, when they come to praise civil rights in one world forum or another, do not argue in favor of limited government - perhaps because they no longer really believe in it. They always talk as if their mission is to persuade authoritarian or totalitarian governments to make a gift of civil rights to their people.

"POLITICAL RIGHTS are those to participate, in one degree or another, in government. One-person-one-vote is indeed a constitutional principle by which a people may govern itself. But it is not the sole such principle. Only a dogmatist would insist that it is, everywhere and always, the best principle. Even the United States, after all, for most of its history has not been governed by this principle.

"The proper extent of political rights in any nation is not something our State Department can have a meaningful opinion about. It can only be determined by the people of that nation, who will draw on their own political and cultural backgrounds in arriving at a suitable disposition of this matter.

"We can try to set them a good example by making our democratic republic as admirable as possible - as our Founding Fathers urged. But that's about all we can do - as our Founding Fathers recognized.