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Equality ................................................................................................................................................................1

Charles Dudley Warner ............................................................................................................................1

In accordance with the advice of Diogenes of Apollonia in the beginning of his treatise on Natural

Philosophy"It appears to me to be well for every one who commences any sort of philosophical treatise to

It would be a most interesting study to trace the growth in the world of the doctrine of "equality." That is not

the purpose of this essay, any further than is necessary for definition. We use the term in its popular sense, in

the meaning, somewhat vague, it is true, which it has had since the middle of the eighteenth century. In the

popular apprehension it is apt to be confounded with uniformity; and this not without reason, since in many

applications of the theory the tendency is to produce likeness or uniformity. Nature, with equal laws, tends

always to diversity; and doubtless the just notion of equality in human affairs consists with unlikeness. Our

purpose is to note some of the tendencies of the dogma as it is at present understood by a considerable portion

We regard the formulated doctrine as modern. It would be too much to say that some notion of the "equality

of men" did not underlie the socialistic and communistic ideas which prevailed from time to time in the

ancient world, and broke out with volcanic violence in the Grecian and Roman communities. But those

popular movements seem to us rather blind struggles against physical evils, and to be distinguished from

those more intelligent actions based upon the theory which began to stir Europe prior to the Reformation.

It is sufficient for our purpose to take the welldefined theory of modern times. Whether the ideal republic of

Plato was merely a convenient form for philosophical speculation, or whether, as the greatest authority on

political economy in Germany, Dr. William Roscher, thinks, it "was no mere fancy"; whether Plato's notion

of the identity of man and the State is compatible with the theory of equality, or whether it is, as many

communists say, indispensable to it, we need not here discuss. It is true that in his Republic almost all the

social theories which have been deduced from the modern proclamation of equality are elaborated. There was

to be a community of property, and also a community of wives and children. The equality of the sexes was

insisted on to the extent of living in common, identical education and pursuits, equal share in all labors, in

occupations, and in government. Between the sexes there was allowed only one ultimate difference. The

Greeks, as Professor Jowett says, had noble conceptions of womanhood; but Plato's ideal for the sexes had no

counterpart in their actual life, nor could they have understood the sort of equality upon which he insisted.

More than any other Oriental peoples the Egyptians of the Ancient Empire entertained the idea of the equality

of the sexes; but the equality of man was not conceived by them. Still less did any notion of it exist in the

Jewish state. It was the fashion with the socialists of 1793, as it has been with the international assemblages

at Geneva in our own day, to trace the genesis of their notions back to the first Christian age. The

farreaching influence of the new gospel in the liberation of the human mind and in promoting just and

divinelyordered relations among men is admitted; its origination of the social and political dogma we are

considering is denied. We do not find that Christ himself anywhere expressed it or acted on it. He associated

with the lowly, the vile, the outcast; he taught that all men, irrespective of rank or possessions, are sinners,

and in equal need of help. But he attempted no change in the conditions of society. The "communism" of the

early Christians was the temporary relation of a persecuted and isolated sect, drawn together by common

necessities and dangers, and by the new enthusiasm of self surrender. ["The community of goods of the first

Christians at Jerusalem, so frequently cited and extolled, was only a community of use, not of ownership

(Acts iv. 32), and throughout a voluntary act of love, not a duty (v. 4); least of all, a right which the poorer

might assert. Spite of all this, that community of goods produced a chronic state of poverty in the church of

Jerusalem." (Principles of Political Economy. By William Roscher. Note to Section LXXXI. English

translation. New York: Henry Holt Co. 1878.)] Paul announced the universal brotherhood of man, but he

as clearly recognized the subordination of society, in the duties of ruler and subject, master and slave, and in

all the domestic relations; and although his gospel may be interpreted to contain the elements of revolution, it

is not probable that he undertook to inculcate, by the proclamation of "universal brotherhood," anything more

than the duty of universal sympathy between all peoples and classes as society then existed.

If Christianity has been and is the force in promoting and shaping civilization that we regard it, we may be

sure that it is not as a political agent, or an annuller of the inequalities of life, that we are to expect aid from it.

Its office, or rather one of its chief offices on earth, is to diffuse through the world, regardless of condition or

possessions or talent or opportunity, sympathy and a recognition of the value of manhood underlying every

lot and every diversitya value not measured by earthly accidents, but by heavenly standards. This we

understand to be "Christian equality." Of course it consists with inequalities of condition, with subordination,

discipline, obedience; to obey and serve is as honorable as to command and to be served.

If the religion of Christ should ever be acclimated on earth, the result would not be the removal of hardships

and suffering, or of the necessity of selfsacrifice; but the bitterness and discontent at unequal conditions

would measurably disappear. At the bar of Christianity the poor man is the equal of the rich, and the learned

of the unlearned, since intellectual acquisition is no guarantee of moral worth. The content that Christianity

would bring to our perturbed society would come from the practical recognition of the truth that all

conditions may be equally honorable. The assertion of the dignity of man and of labor is, we imagine, the

sum and substance of the equality and communism of the New Testament. But we are to remember that this

Whatever the theories of the ancient world were, the development of democratic ideas is sufficiently marked

in the fifteenth century, and even in the fourteenth, to rob the eighteenth of the credit of originating the

doctrine of equality. To mention only one of the early writers, [For copious references to authorities on the

spread of communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and women in four periods of

the world's historynamely, at the time of the decline of Greece, in the degeneration of the Roman republic,

among the moderns in the age of the Reformation, and again in our own daysee Roscher's Political

Economy, notes to Section LXXIX., et seq.] Marsilio, a physician of Padua, in 1324, said that the laws

ought to be made by all the citizens; and he based this sovereignty of the people upon the greater likelihood

of laws being better obeyed, and also being good laws, when they were made by the whole body of the

In 1750 and 1753, J. J. Rousseau published his two discourses on questions proposed by the Academy of

Dijon: "Has the Restoration of Sciences Contributed to Purify or to Corrupt Manners?" and "What is the

Origin of Inequality among Men, and is it Authorized by Natural Law?" These questions show the direction

and the advance of thinking on social topics in the middle of the eighteenth century. Rousseau's Contrat

But almost threequarters of a century before, in 1690, John Locke published his two treatises on

government. Rousseau was familiar with them. Mr. John Morley, in his admirable study of Rousseau,

[Rousseau. By John Morley. London: Chapman Hall. 1873I have used it freely in the glance at this

period.] fully discusses the latter's obligation to Locke; and the exposition leaves Rousseau little credit for

originality, but considerable for illogical misconception. He was, in fact, the most illogical of great men, and

the most inconsistent even of geniuses. The ContratSocial is a reaction in many things from the discourses,

and Emile is almost an entire reaction, especially in the theory of education, from both.

His central doctrine of popular sovereignty was taken from Locke. The English philosopher said, in his

second treatise, "To understand political power aright and derive it from its original, we must consider what

state all men are naturally in; and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their

persons and possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or

depending upon the will of any other mana state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is

reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same

species and rank, promiscuously born to all the advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should

also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them

all should by any manifest declaration of His will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and

clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty." But a state of liberty is not a state of

license. We cannot exceed our own rights without assailing the rights of others. There is no such

subordination as authorizes us to destroy one another. As every one is bound to preserve himself, so he is

bound to preserve the rest of mankind, and except to do justice upon an offender we may not impair the life,

liberty, health, or goods of another. Here Locke deduces the power that one man may have over another;

community could not exist if transgressors were not punished. Every wrongdoer places himself in "a state of

war." Here is the difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which men, says Locke, have

confoundedalluding probably to Hobbes's notion of the lawlessness of human society in the original

The portion of Locke's treatise which was not accepted by the French theorists was that relating to property.

Property in lands or goods is due wholly and only to the labor man has put into it. By labor he has removed it

from the common state in which nature has placed it, and annexed something to it that excludes the common

Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes as well as from Locke in his conception of popular sovereignty; but this

was not his only lack of originality. His discourse on primitive society, his unscientific and unhistoric notions

about the original condition of man, were those common in the middle of the eighteenth century. All the

thinkers and philosophers and fine ladies and gentlemen assumed a certain state of nature, and built upon it,

out of words and phrases, an airy and easy reconstruction of society, without a thought of investigating the

past, or inquiring into the development of mankind. Every one talked of "the state of nature" as if he knew all

about it. "The conditions of primitive man," says Mr. Morley, "were discussed by very incompetent ladies

and gentlemen at convivial supperparties, and settled with complete assurance." That was the age when

solitary Frenchmen plunged into the wilderness of North America, confidently expecting to recover the

The state of nature of Rousseau was a state in which inequality did not exist, and with a fervid rhetoric he

tried to persuade his readers that it was the happier state. He recognized inequality, it is true, as a word of two

different meanings: first, physical inequality, difference of age, strength, health, and of intelligence and

character; second, moral and political inequality, difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment

of otherssuch as riches, honor, power. The first difference is established by nature, the second by man. So

long, however, as the state of nature endures, no disadvantages flow from the natural inequalities.

In Rousseau's account of the means by which equality was lost, the incoming of the ideas of property is

prominent. From property arose civil society. With property came in inequality. His exposition of inequality

is confused, and it is not possible always to tell whether he means inequality of possessions or of political

rights. His contemporary, Morelly, who published the Basileade in 1753, was troubled by no such ambiguity.

He accepts the doctrine that men are formed by laws, but holds that they are by nature good, and that laws, by

establishing a division of the products of nature, broke up the sociability of men, and that all political and

moral evils are the result of private property. Political inequality is an accident of inequality of possessions,

The opening sentence of the ContratSocial is, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is a slave," a statement

which it is difficult to reconcile with the fact that every human being is born helpless, dependent, and into

conditions of subjection, conditions that we have no reason to suppose were ever absent from the race. But

Rousseau never said, "All men are born equal." He recognized, as we have seen, natural inequality. What he

held was that the artificial differences springing from the social union were disproportionate to the capacities

springing from the original constitution; and that society, as now organized, tends to make the gulf wider

The wellknown theory upon which Rousseau's superstructure rests is that society is the result of a compact,

a partnership between men. They have not made an agreement to submit their individual sovereignty to some

superior power, but they have made a covenant of brotherhood. It is a contract of association. Men were, and

ought to be, equal cooperators, not only in politics, but in industries and all the affairs of life. All the citizens

are participants in the sovereign authority. Their sovereignty is inalienable; power may be transmitted, but not

will; if the people promise to obey, it dissolves itself by the very actif there is a master, there is no longer a

people. Sovereignty is also indivisible; it cannot be split up into legislative, judiciary, and executive power.

Society being the result of a compact made by men, it followed that the partners could at any time remake it,

their sovereignty being inalienable. And this the French socialists, misled by a priori notions, attempted to do,

on the theory of the ContratSocial, as if they had a tabula rasa, without regarding the existing constituents of

Equality, as a phrase, having done duty as a dissolvent, was pressed into service as a constructor. As this is

not so much an essay on the nature of equality is an attempt to indicate some of the modern tendencies to

carry out what is illusory in the dogma, perhaps enough has been said of this period. Mr. Morley very well

remarks that the doctrine of equality as a demand for a fair chance in the world is unanswerable; but that it is

false when it puts him who uses his chance well on the same level with him who uses it ill. There is no doubt

that when Condorcet said, "Not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the social art," he

The next authoritative announcement of equality, to which it is necessary to refer, is in the American

Declaration of Independence, in these words: "We hold these truths to be selfevident: that all men are

created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men,

deriving their just power from the consent of the governed." And the Declaration goes on, in temperate and

guarded language, to assert the right of a people to change their form of government when it becomes

Although the genesis of these sentiments seems to be French rather than English, and equality is not defined,

and critics have differed as to whether the equality clause is independent or qualified by what follows, it is

not necessary to suppose that Thomas Jefferson meant anything inconsistent with the admitted facts of nature

and of history. It is important to bear in mind that the statesmen of our Revolution were inaugurating a

political and not a social revolution, and that the gravamen of their protest was against the authority of a

distant crown. Nevertheless, these dogmas, independent of the circumstances in which they were uttered,

have exercised and do exercise a very powerful influence upon the thinking of mankind on social and

political topics, and are being applied without limitations, and without recognition of the fact that if they are

true, in the sense meant by their originators, they are not the whole truth. It is to be noticed that rights are

mentioned, but not duties, and that if political rights only are meant, political duties are not inculcated as of

equal moment. It is not announced that political power is a function to be discharged for the good of the

whole body, and not a mere right to be enjoyed for the advantage of the possessor; and it is to be noted also

The dogma that "government derives its just power from the consent of the governed" is entirely consonant

with the book theories of the eighteenth century, and needs to be confronted, and practically is confronted,

with the equally good dogma that "governments derive their just power from conformity with the principles

of justice." We are not to imagine, for instance, that the framers of the Declaration really contemplated the

exclusion from political organization of all higher law than that in the "consent of the governed," or the

application of the theory, let us say, to a colony composed for the most part of outcasts, murderers, thieves,

and prostitutes, or to such states as today exist in the Orient. The Declaration was framed for a highly

Many writers, and some of them English, have expressed curiosity, if not wonder, at the different fortunes

which attended the doctrine of equality in America and in France. The explanation is on the surface, and need

not be sought in the fact of a difference of social and political level in the two countries at the start, nor even

in the further fact that the colonies were already accustomed to selfgovernment.

The simple truth is that the dogmas of the Declaration were not put into the fundamental law. The

Constitution is the most practical state document ever made. It announces no dogmas, proclaims no theories.

It accepted society as it was, with its habits and traditions; raising no abstract questions whether men are born

free or equal, or how society ought to be organized. It is simply a working compact, made by "the people," to

promote union, establish justice, and secure the blessings of liberty; and the equality is in the assumption of

the right of "the people of the United States" to do this. And yet, in a recent number of Blackwood's

Magazine, a writer makes the amusing statement, "I have never met an American who could deny that, while

firmly maintaining that the theory was sound which, in the beautiful language of the Constitution, proclaims

An enlightening commentary on the meaning of the Declaration, in the minds of the American statesmen of

the period, is furnished by the opinions which some of them expressed upon the French Revolution while it

was in progress. Gouverneur Morris, minister to France in 1789, was a conservative republican; Thomas

Jefferson was a radical democrat. Both of them had a warm sympathy with the French "people" in the

Revolution; both hoped for a republic; both recognized, we may reasonably infer, the sufficient cause of the

Revolution in the longcontinued corruption of court and nobility, and the intolerable sufferings of the lower

orders; and both, we have equal reason to believe, thought that a fair accommodation, short of a dissolution of

society, was defeated by the imbecility of the king and the treachery and malignity of a considerable portion

of the nobility. The Revolution was not caused by theories, however much it may have been excited or

guided by them. But both Morris and Jefferson saw the futility of the application of the abstract dogma of

equality and the theories of the Social Contract to the reconstruction of government and the reorganization of

If the aristocracy were malignantthough numbers of them were far from being sothere was also a

malignant prejudice aroused against them, and M. Taine is not far wrong when he says of this prejudice, "Its

hard, dry kernel consists of the abstract idea of equality."[The French Revolution. By H. A. Taine. Vol. i.,

bk. ii., chap. ii., sec. iii. Translation. New York: Henry Holt Co.] Taine's French Revolution is cynical,

and, with all its accumulation of material, omits some facts necessary to a philosophical history; but a

passage following that quoted is worth reproducing in this connection: " The treatment of the nobles of the

Assembly is the same as the treatment of the Protestants by Louis XIV. . . . One hundred thousand

Frenchmen driven out at the end of the seventeenth century, and one hundred thousand driven out at the end

of the eighteenth! Mark how an intolerant democracy completes the work of an intolerant monarchy! The

moral aristocracy was mowed down in the name of uniformity; the social aristocracy is mowed down in the

name of equality. For the second time an abstract principle, and with the same effect, buries its blade in the

Notwithstanding the worldwide advertisement of the French experiment, it has taken almost a century for

the dogma of equality, at least outside of France, to filter down from the speculative thinkers into a general

popular acceptance, as an active principle to be used in the shaping of affairs, and to become more potent in

the popular mind than tradition or habit. The attempt is made to apply it to society with a brutal logic; and we

might despair as to the result, if we did not know that the world is not ruled by logic. Nothing is so

fascinating in the hands of the halfinformed as a neat dogma; it seems the perfect key to all difficulties. The

formula is applied in contempt and ignorance of the past, as if building up were as easy as pulling down, and

as if society were a machine to be moved by mechanical appliances, and not a living organism composed of

distinct and sensitive beings. Along with the spread of a belief in the uniformity of natural law has

unfortunately gone a suggestion of parallelism of the moral law to it, and a notion that if we can discover the

right formula, human society and government can be organized with a mathematical justice to all the parts.

By many the dogma of equality is held to be that formula, and relief from the greater evils of the social state

Let us now consider some of the present movements and tendencies that are related, more or less, to this

I. Absolute equality is seen to depend upon absolute supremacy of the state. Professor Henry Fawcett says,

"Excessive dependence on the state is the most prominent characteristic of modern socialism." "These

proposals to prohibit inheritance, to abolish private property, and to make the state the owner of all the capital

and the administrator of the entire industry of the country are put forward as representing socialism in its

ultimate and highest development." ["Socialism in Germany and the United States," Fortnightly Review,

Society and government should be recast till they conform to the theory, or, let us say, to its exaggerations.

Men can unmake what they have made. There is no higher authority anywhere than the will of the majority,

no matter what the majority is in intellect and morals. Fifty one ignorant men have a natural right to

All men being equal, one man is as fit to legislate and execute as another. A recently elected Congressman

from Maine vehemently repudiated in a public address, as a slander, the accusation that he was educated. The

theory was that, uneducated, he was the proper representative of the average ignorance of his district, and that

ignorance ought to be represented in the legislature in kind. The ignorant know better what they want than the

educated know for them. "Their education [that of college men] destroys natural perception and judgment; so

that cultivated people are onesided, and their judgment is often inferior to that of the working people."

"Cultured people have made up their minds, and are hard to move." "No lawyer should be elected to a place

in any legislative body." [Opinions of workingmen, reported in "The Nationals, their Origin and their

Experience is of no account, neither is history, nor tradition, nor the accumulated wisdom of ages. On all

questions of political economy, finance, morals, the ignorant man stands on a par with the best informed as a

legislator. We might cite any number of the results of these illusions. A member of a recent House of

Representatives declared that we "can repair the losses of the war by the issue of a sufficient amount of paper

money." An intelligent mechanic of our acquaintance, a leader among the Nationals, urging the theory of his

party, that banks should be destroyed, and that the government should issue to the people as much "paper

money" as they need, denied the right of banks or of any individuals to charge interest on money. Yet he

Laws must be the direct expression of the will of the majority, and be altered solely on its will. It would be

well, therefore, to have a continuous election, so that, any day, the electors can change their representative for

a new man. "If my caprice be the source of law, then my enjoyment may be the source of the division of the

Property is the creator of inequality, and this factor in our artificial state can be eliminated only by

absorption. It is the duty of the government to provide for all the people, and the sovereign people will see to

it that it does. The election franchise is a natural righta man's weapon to protect himself. It may be asked,

If it is just this, and not a sacred trust accorded to be exercised for the benefit of society, why may not a man

What is there illogical in these positions from the premise given? "Communism," says Roscher," [Political

Economy, bk. i., ch. v., 78.] is the logically not inconsistent exaggeration of the principle of equality. Men

who hear themselves designated as the sovereign people, and their welfare as the supreme law of the state,

are more apt than others to feel more keenly the distance which separates their own misery from the

superabundance of others. And, indeed, to what an extent our physical wants are determined by our

The tendency of the exaggeration of man's will as the foundation of government is distinctly materialistic; it

is a selfsufficiency that shuts out God and the higher law. ["And, indeed, if the will of man is

allpowerful, if states are to be distinguished from one another only by their boundaries, if everything may be

changed like the scenery in a play by a flourish of the magic wand of a system, if man may arbitrarily make

the right, if nations can be put through evolutions like regiments of troops, what a field would the world

present for attempts at the realizations of the wildest dreams, and what a temptation would be offered to take

possession, by main force, of the government of human affairs, to destroy the rights of property and the rights

of capital, to gratify ardent longings without trouble, and to provide the muchcoveted means of enjoyment!

The Titans have tried to scale the heavens, and have fallen into the most degrading materialism. Purely

speculative dogmatism sinks into materialism." (M. Wolowski's Essay on the Historical Method, prefixed to

his translation of Roscher's Political Economy.)]We need to remember that the Creator of man, and not

man himself, formed society and instituted government; that God is always behind human society and

sustains it; that marriage and the family and all social relations are divinely established; that man's duty,

coinciding with his right, is, by the light of history, by experience, by observation of men, and by the aid of

revelation, to find out and make operative, as well as he can, the divine law in human affairs. And it may be

added that the sovereignty of the people, as a divine trust, may be as logically deduced from the divine

institution of government as the old divine right of kings. Government, by whatever name it is called, is a

matter of experience and expediency. If we submit to the will of the majority, it is because it is more

convenient to do so; and if the republic or the democracy vindicate itself, it is because it works best, on the

whole, for a particular people. But it needs no prophet to say that it will not work long if God is shut out from

II. Equality of education. In our American system there is, not only theoretically but practically, an equality

of opportunity in the public schools, which are free to all children, and rise by gradations from the primaries

to the highschools, in which the curriculum in most respects equals, and in variety exceeds, that of many

thirdclass "colleges." In these schools nearly the whole round of learning, in languages, science, and art, is

touched. The system has seemed to be the best that could be devised for a free society, where all take part in

the government, and where so much depends upon the intelligence of the electors. Certain objections,

however, have been made to it. As this essay is intended only to be tentative, we shall state some of them,

( 1. ) The first charge is superficialitya necessary consequence of attempting too muchand a want of

( 2. ) A uniformity in mediocrity is alleged from the use of the same textbooks and methods in all schools,

for all grades and capacities. This is one of the most common criticisms on our social state by a certain class

of writers in England, who take an unflagging interest in our development. One answer to it is this: There is

more reason to expect variety of development and character in a generally educated than in an ignorant

( 3. ) It is said that secular educationand the general schools open to all in a community of mixed religions

must be secularis training the rising generation to be materialists and socialists.

( 4. ) Perhaps a betterfounded charge is that a system of equal education, with its superficiality, creates

discontent with the condition in which a majority of men must bethat of labora distaste for trades and

for handwork, an idea that what is called intellectual labor (let us say, casting up accounts in a shop, or

writing trashy stories for a sensational newspaper) is more honorable than physical labor; and encourages the

false notion that "the elevation of the working classes" implies the removal of men and women from those

We should hesitate to draw adverse conclusions in regard to a system yet so young that its results cannot be

fairly estimated. Only after two or three generations can its effects upon the character of a great people be

measured: Observations differ, and testimony is difficult to obtain. We think it safe to say that those states are

most prosperous which have the best free schools. But if the philosopher inquires as to the general effect

upon the national character in respect to the objections named, he must wait for a reply.

III. The pursuit of the chimera of social equality, from the belief that it should logically follow political

equality; resulting in extravagance, misapplication of natural capacities, a notion that physical labor is

dishonorable, or that the state should compel all to labor alike, and in efforts to remove inequalities of

IV. The equality of the sexes. The stir in the middle of the eighteenth century gave a great impetus to the

emancipation of woman; though, curiously enough, Rousseau, in unfolding his plan of education for Sophie,

in Emile, inculcates an almost Oriental subjection of womanher education simply that she may please man.

The true enfranchisement of womanthat is, the recognition (by herself as well as by man) of her real place

in the economy of the world, in the full development of her capacitiesis the greatest gain to civilization

since the Christian era. The movement has its excesses, and the gain has not been without loss. "When we

turn to modern literature," writes Mr. Money, "from the pages in which Fenelon speaks of the education of

girls, who does not feel that the world has lost a sacred accentthat some ineffable essence has passed out

How far the expectation has been realized that women, in fiction, for instance, would be more accurately

described, better understood, and appear as nobler and lovelier beings when women wrote the novels, this is

not the place to inquire. The movement has results which are unavoidable in a period of transition, and

probably only temporary. The education of woman and the development of her powers hold the greatest

promise for the regeneration of society. But this development, yet in its infancy, and pursued with much

crudeness and misconception of the end, is not enough. Woman would not only be equal with man, but would

be like him; that is, perform in society the functions he now performs. Here, again, the notion of equality is

pushed towards uniformity. The reformers admit structural differences in the sexes, though these, they say,

are greatly exaggerated by subjection; but the functional differences are mainly to be eliminated. Women

ought to mingle in all the occupations of men, as if the physical differences did not exist. The movement goes

to obliterate, as far as possible, the distinction between sexes. Nature is, no doubt, amused at this attempt. A

recent writer["Biology and Woman's Rights," Quarterly Journal of Science, November, 1878.], says:

"The 'femme libre' [free woman] of the new social order may, indeed, escape the charge of neglecting her

family and her household by contending that it is not her vocation to become a wife and a mother! Why, then,

we ask, is she constituted a woman at all? Merely that she may become a sort of secondrate man?"

The truth is that this movement, based always upon a misconception of equality, so far as it would change the

duties of the sexes, is a retrograde. ["It has been frequently observed that among declining nations the

social differences between the two sexes are first obliterated, and afterwards even the intellectual differences.

The more masculine the women become, the more effeminate become the men. It is no good symptom when

there are almost as many female writers and female rulers as there are male. Such was the case, for instance,

in the Hellenistic kingdoms, and in the age of the Caesars. What today is called by many the emancipation of

woman would ultimately end in the dissolution of the family, and, if carried out, render poor service to the

majority of women. If man and woman were placed entirely on the same level, and if in the competition

between the two sexes nothing but an actual superiority should decide, it is to be feared that woman would

soon be relegated to a condition as hard as that in which she is found among all barbarous nations. It is

precisely family life and higher civilization that have emancipated woman. Those theorizers who, led astray

by the dark side of higher civilization, preach a community of goods, generally contemplate in their

simultaneous recommendation of the emancipation of woman a more or less developed form of a community

of wives. The grounds of the two institutions are very similar." (Roscher's Political Economy, p. 250.) Note

also that difference in costumes of the sexes is least apparent among lowly civilized peoples.] One of the

most striking features in our progress from barbarism to civilization is the proper adjustment of the work for

men and women. One test of a civilization is the difference of this work. This is a question not merely of

division of labor, but of differentiation with regard to sex. It not only takes into account structural differences

and physiological disadvantages, but it recognizes the finer and higher use of woman in society.

The attainable, not to say the ideal, society requires an increase rather than a decrease of the differences

between the sexes. The differences may be due to physical organization, but the structural divergence is but a

faint type of deeper separation in mental and spiritual constitution. That which makes the charm and power of

woman, that for which she is created, is as distinctly feminine as that which makes the charm and power of

men is masculine. Progress requires constant differentiation, and the line of this is the development of each

sex in its special functions, each being true to the highest ideal for itself, which is not that the woman should

be a man, or the man a woman. The enjoyment of social life rests very largely upon the encounter and play of

the subtle peculiarities which mark the two sexes; and society, in the limited sense of the word, not less than

the whole structure of our civilization, requires the development of these peculiarities. It is in diversity, and

not in an equality tending to uniformity, that we are to expect the best results from the race.

V. Equality of races; or rather a removal of the inequalities, social and political, arising in the contact of

Perhaps equality is hardly the word to use here, since uniformity is the thing aimed at; but the root of the

proposal is in the dogma we are considering. The tendency of the age is to uniformity. The facilities of travel

and communication, the new inventions and the use of machinery in manufacturing, bring men into close and

uniform relations, and induce the disappearance of national characteristics and of race peculiarities. Men, the

world over, are getting to dress alike, eat alike, and disbelieve in the same things: It is the sentimental

complaint of the traveler that his search for the picturesque is ever more difficult, that race distinctions and

habits are in a way to be improved off the face of the earth, and that a most uninteresting monotony is

supervening. The complaint is not wholly sentimental, and has a deeper philosophical reason than the mere

We find a striking illustration of the equalizing, not to say leveling, tendency of the age in an able paper by

Canon George Rawlinson, of the University of Oxford, contributed recently to an American periodical of a

high class and conservative character. [" Duties of Higher towards Lower Races." By George Rawlinson.

Princeton Review. November, 1878. New York.] This paper proposes, as a remedy for the social and

political evils caused by the negro element in our population, the miscegenation of the white and black races,

to the end that the black race may be wholly absorbed in the whitean absorption of four millions by

thirtysix millions, which he thinks might reasonably be expected in about a century, when the lower type

Perhaps the pleasure of being absorbed is not equal to the pleasure of absorbing, and we cannot say how this

proposal will commend itself to the victims of the euthanasia. The results of miscegenation on this

continentblack with red, and white with blackthe results morally, intellectually, and physically, are not

It is not, however, upon sentimental grounds that we oppose this extension of the exaggerated dogma of

equality. Our objection is deeper. Race distinctions ought to be maintained for the sake of the best

development of the race, and for the continuance of that mutual reaction and play of peculiar forces between

races which promise the highest development for the whole. It is not for nothing, we may suppose, that

differentiation has gone on in the world; and we doubt that either benevolence or selfinterest requires this

age to attempt to restore an assumed lost uniformity, and fuse the race traits in a tiresome homogeneity.

Life consists in an exchange of relations, and the more varied the relations interchanged the higher the life.

We want not only different races, but different civilizations in different parts of the globe.

A much more philosophical view of the African problem and the proper destiny of the negro race than that of

Canon Rawlinson is given by a recent colored writer,["Africa and the Africans." By Edmund W. Blyden.

Eraser's Magazine, August, 1878.] an official in the government of Liberia. We are mistaken, says this

excellent observer, in regarding Africa as a land of a homogeneous population, and in confounding the tribes

in a promiscuous manner. There are negroes and negroes. "The numerous tribes inhabiting the vast continent

of Africa can no more be regarded as in every respect equal than the numerous peoples of Asia or Europe can

be so regarded;" and we are not to expect the civilization of Africa to be under one government, but in a great

variety of States, developed according to tribal and race affinities. A still greater mistake is this:

"The mistake which Europeans often make in considering questions of negro improvement and the future of

Africa is in supposing that the negro is the European in embryo, in the undeveloped stage, and that when,

byand by, he shall enjoy the advantages of civilization and culture, he will become like the European; in

other words, that the negro is on the same line of progress, in the same groove, with the European, but

infinitely in the rear . . . . This view proceeds upon the assumption that the two races are called to the same

work, and are alike in potentiality and ultimate development, the negro only needing the element of time,

under certain circumstances, to become European. But to our mind it is not a question between the two races

of inferiority or superiority. There is no absolute or essential superiority on the one side, or absolute or

essential inferiority on the other side. It is a question of difference of endowment and difference of destiny.

No amount of training or culture will make the negro a European. On the other hand, no lack of training or

deficiency of culture will make the European a negro. The two races are not moving in the same groove, with

an immeasurable distance between them, but on parallel lines. They will never meet in the plane of their

activities so as to coincide in capacity or performance. They are not identical, as some think, but unequal;

they are distinct, but equalan idea that is in no way incompatible with the Scripture truth that God hath

The writer goes on, in a strain that is not mere fancy, but that involves one of the truths of inequality, to say

that each race is endowed with peculiar talents; that the negro has aptitudes and capacities which the world

needs, and will lack until he is normally trained. In the grand symphony of the universe, "there are several

sounds not yet brought out, and the feeblest of all is that hitherto produced by the negro ; but he alone can

furnish it." " When the African shall come forward with his peculiar gifts, they will fill a place never before

occupied." In short, the African must be civilized in the line of his capacities. "The present practice of the

friends of Africa is to frame laws according to their own notions for the government and improvement of this

people, whereas God has already enacted the laws for the government of their affairs, which laws should be

carefully ascertained, interpreted, and applied; for until they are found out and conformed to, all labor will be

We have thus passed in review some of the tendencies of the age. We have only touched the edges of a vast

subject, and shall be quite satisfied if we have suggested thought in the direction indicated. But in this limited

view of our complex human problem it is time to ask if we have not pushed the dogma of equality far

enough. Is it not time to look the facts squarely in the face, and conform to them in our efforts for social and

Inequality appears to be the divine order; it always has existed; undoubtedly it will continue; all our theories

and 'a priori' speculations will not change the nature of things. Even inequality of condition is the basis of

progress, the incentive to exertion. Fortunately, if today we could make every man white, every woman as

like man as nature permits, give to every human being the same opportunity of education, and divide equally

among all the accumulated wealth of the world, tomorrow differences, unequal possession, and

differentiation would begin again. We are attempting the regeneration of society with a misleading phrase;

There is an equality, but it is not of outward show; it is independent of condition; it does not destroy property,

nor ignore the difference of sex, nor obliterate race traits. It is the equality of men before God, of men before

the law; it is the equal honor of all honorable labor. No more pernicious notion ever obtained lodgment in

society than the common one that to "rise in the world" is necessarily to change the "condition." Let there be

content with condition; discontent with individual ignorance and imperfection. "We want," says Emerson,

"not a farmer, but a man on a farm." What a mischievous idea is that which has grown, even in the United

States, that manual labor is discreditable! There is surely some defect in the theory of equality in our society

It must be observed, further, that the dogma of equality is not satisfied by the usual admission that one is in

favor of an equality of rights and opportunities, but is against the sweeping application of the theory made by

the socialists and communists. The obvious reply is that equal rights and a fair chance are not possible

without equality of condition, and that property and the whole artificial constitution of society necessitate

inequality of condition. The damage from the current exaggeration of equality is that the attempt to realize

the dogma in factand the attempt is everywhere on footcan lead only to mischief and disappointment.

It would be considered a humorous suggestion to advocate inequality as a theory or as a working dogma. Let

us recognize it, however, as a fact, and shape the efforts for the improvement of the race in accordance with

it, encouraging it in some directions, restraining it from injustice in others. Working by this recognition, we

shall save the race from many failures and bitter disappointments, and spare the world the spectacle of