Equality | Page 5

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 self-government.
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 that all men were born equal, he was," etc.
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
long-continued 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 society in France.
If the aristocracy were malignant--though numbers of them were far
from being so--there 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 heart of a living society."
Notwithstanding the world-wide 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 half-informed 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