vii ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN 309 



potentialities with which they really are born, 

 become more and more obviously converted into 

 actual differences the inequality of political 

 faculty shows itself to be a necessary conse- 

 quence of the inequality of natural faculty. It 

 is probably true that the earliest men were 

 nomads. But among a body of naked wander- 

 ing savages, though there may be no verbally 

 recognised distinctions of rank or office, superior 

 strength and cunning confer authority of a more 

 valid kind than that secured by Acts of Parlia- 

 ment ; there may be no property in things, but 

 the witless man will be poverty-stricken in ideas, 

 the clever man will be a capitalist in that same 

 commodity, which in the long run buys all other 

 commodities ; one will miss opportunities, the 

 other will make them ; and, proclaim human 

 equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve 

 his brother. So long as men are men and society 

 is society, human equality will be a dream ; and 

 the assumption that it does exist is as untrue in 

 fact as it sets the mark of impracticability on every 

 theory of what ought to be, which starts from it. 



And that last remark suggests that there is 

 another way of regarding Rousseau's speculations. 

 It may be pointed out that, after all, whatever 

 estimate we may form of him, the author of works 

 which have made such a noise in the world could 

 not have been a mere fool ; and that, if, in their 

 plain and obvious sense, the doctrines which he 



