Equality | Page 6

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 is expected from its
logical extension.
Let us now consider some of the present movements and tendencies
that are related, more or less, to this belief:
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, November, 1878.]
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 legislate for the one hundred,
as against forty-nine intelligent men.
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 one-sided, 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 working-men,
reported in "The Nationals, their Origin and their Aims," The Atlantic
Monthly, November, 1878.]
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
would take rent for the house he owns.
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 nation's
resources."--[Stahl's Rechtsphilosophie, quoted by Roscher.]
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 right--a 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
sell it, if it is for his interest to do so?
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 intellectual mold!"
The tendency of the exaggeration of man's will as the foundation of
government is distinctly materialistic; it is a self-sufficiency that shuts
out God and the higher law.--["And, indeed, if the will of man is
all-powerful, 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