ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN 773 



arid-ready way as can be devised to get political questions settled, 

 yet that, theoretically, the despotism of a majority is as little jus- 

 tifiable and as dangerous as that of one man ; and yet another, 

 that voting power, as a means of giving effect to opinion, is more 

 likely to prove a curse than a blessing to the voters, unless that 

 opinion is the result of a sound judgment operating upon sound 

 knowledge. Some experience of sea-life leads me to think that I 

 should be very sorry to find myself on board a ship in which the 

 voices of the cook and the loblolly boys counted for as much as 

 those of the officers, upon a question of steering, or reefing top- 

 sails ; or where the " great heart " of the crew was called upon to 

 settle the ship's course. And there is no sea more dangerous than 

 the ocean of practical politics none in which there is more need 

 of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the 

 waves rise high. 



The conclusion of the whole matter, then, would seem to be 

 that the doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at 

 any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction. Nor does 

 the proposition fare much better if we modify it, so as to say that 

 all men ought to be free and equal, so long as the " ought " poses 

 as a command of immutable morality. For, assuredly, it is not 

 intuitively certain "that all men ought to be free and equal/' 

 Therefore, if it is to be justified at all a priori, it must be dedu- 

 cible from some proposition which is intuitively certain; and 

 unfortunately none is forthcoming. For the proposition that men 

 ought to be free to do what they please, so long as they do not 

 infringe on the equal rights of other men, assumes that men have 

 equal rights and can not be used to prove that assumption. And 

 if, instead of appealing to philosophy, we turn to revealed religion, 

 I am not aware that either Judaism or Christianity affirms the 

 political freedom or the political equality of men in Rousseau's 

 sense. They affirm the equality of men before God but that is 

 an equality either of insignificance or of imperfection. 



With the demonstration that men are not all equal under 

 whatever aspect they are contemplated, and that the assumption 

 that they ought to be considered equal has no sort of a priori 

 foundation however much it may, in reference to positive law, 

 with due limitations, be justifiable by considerations of practical 

 expediency the bottom of Rousseau's argument, from a priori 

 ethical assumptions to the denial of the right of an individual to 

 hold private property, falls out. For Rousseau, with more logical 

 consistency than some of those who have come after him, puts 

 the land and its produce upon the same footing. " Vous 6tes per- 

 dus si vous oubliez que les fruits sont a tous, et que la terre n'est 

 a personne," says he. (You are lost if you forget that the fruits 

 are for all and the land is not for any one.) 



