Equality | Page 3

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 confounded--alluding
probably to Hobbes's notion of the lawlessness of human society in the
original condition.
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 rights of other men.
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 supper-parties, and settled with complete
assurance." That was the age when solitary Frenchmen plunged into the
wilderness of North America, confidently expecting to recover the
golden age under the shelter of a wigwam and in the society of a
squaw.
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 others-such 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, and the
renovation of the latter lies in the abolition of the former.

The opening sentence of the Contrat-Social 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 between those who have privileges and those
who have none.
The well-known theory upon which Rousseau's superstructure rests is
that society is the result of a compact, a partnership between men. They
have not made