Equality | Page 4

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 act--if 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 Contrat-Social, as if they had a tabula rasa,
without regarding the existing constituents of society, or traditions, or
historical growths.
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 uttered the sentiments of the socialists
of the Revolution.
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 self-evident: 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 destructive of the ends named.
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 that this idea did not enter into the conception
of Rousseau.

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 intelligent and
virtuous society.
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