vil ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN 311 



to that end. Even before the great leveller, 

 Rome, had actually thrown down innumerable 

 social and national party-walls, had absorbed all 

 other forms of citizenship into her own, and brought 

 the inhabitants of what was then known as the 

 world under one system of obligations thoughtful 

 men were discovering that it was desirable, in the 

 interests of society, that all men should be as free 

 as possible, consistently with those interests ; and 

 that they should all be equally bound by the 

 ethical and legal obligations which are essential to 

 social existence. It will be observed that this 

 conclusion is one which might be arrived at by 

 observation and induction from the phenomena of 

 past and present experience. My belief is that it 

 is the conclusion which must be reached by those 

 means, when they are rightly employed and 

 that, in point of fact, the doctrines of freedom and 

 equality, so far as they were preached by the 

 Stoics and others, would have had not the least 

 success, if they had not been so far approved by 

 experience and so far in harmony with human 

 instincts, that the Roman jurists found they could 

 work them up with effect into practical legislation. 

 For the a priori arguments of the philosophers 

 in the last century of the Republic, and the first 

 of the Empire, stand examination no better than 

 those of the philosophers in the centuries before 

 and after the French Revolution. As is the 

 fashion of speculators, they scorned to remain on 



