77 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



has it not been as much held in bondage by its surroundings and 

 driven hither and thither by the scourge of opinion, as a veritable 

 slave, although the fetters and the whip may be invisible and in- 

 tangible ? 



Surely, Aristotle was much nearer the truth in this matter 

 than Hobbes or Rousseau. And if the predicate "born slave" 

 would more nearly agree with fact than " born free," what is to 

 be said about " born equal " ? Rousseau, like the sentimental 

 rhetorician that he was, and half, or more than half, sham, as 

 all sentimental rhetoricians are, sagaciously fought shy, as we 

 have seen, of the question of the influence of natural upon politi- 

 cal equality. But those of us who do not care for sentiment and 

 do care for truth may not evade the consideration of that which 

 is really the key of the position. If Rousseau, instead of letting 

 his children go to the infants trouves, had taken the trouble to 

 discharge a father's duties toward them, he would hardly have 

 talked so fast about men being born equal, even in a political 

 sense. For, if that merely means that all new-born children are 

 political zeros it is, as we have seen, though true enough, nothing 

 to the purpose ; while, if it means that, in their potentiality of be- 

 coming factors in any social organization citizens in Rousseau's 

 sense all men are born equal, it is probably the most astounding 

 falsity that ever was put forth by a political speculator ; and that, 

 as all students of political speculation will agree, is saying a good 

 deal for it. In fact, nothing is more remarkable than the wide 

 inequality which children, even of the same family, exhibit, as 

 soon as the mental and moral qualities begin to manifest them- 

 selves ; which is earlier than most people fancy. Every family 

 spontaneously becomes a polity. Among the children, there are 

 some who continue to be " more honored and more powerful than 

 the rest, and to make themselves obeyed " (sometimes, indeed, by 

 their elders) in virtue of nothing but their moral and mental 

 qualities. Here " political inequality " visibly dogs the heels of 

 " natural " inequality. The group of children becomes a political 

 body, a civitas, with its rights of property, and its practical dis- 

 tinctions of rank and power. And all this comes about neither 

 by force nor by fraud, but as the necessary consequence of the 

 innate inequalities of capability. 



Thus men are certainly not born free and equal in natural 

 qualities ; when they are born, the predicates " free " and " equal " 

 in the political sense are not applicable to them ; and as they de- 

 velop, year by year, the differences in the political potentialities 

 with which they really are born, become more and more obviously 

 converted into actual differences the inequality of political fac- 

 ulty shows itself to be a necessary consequence of the inequality 

 of natural faculty. It is probably true that the earliest men were 



