The soul of the man is the localization of divinity; in a sense each man is a manifestation of the Incarnation.  Black or white, conspicuous or obscure, intelligent or stupid, offspring of a creative race or bound by the limitations of one that is static or in process of decay, there is no difference in the universal claim to justice, charity, and opportunity.  The soul of a Cantonese river-man, of a Congo slave, of an East Side Jew, is in itself as essentially precious and worth saving as the soul of a bishop, of a descendant of a Norman viking or an Irish king, or that of a volunteer soldier in the late armies of France or Great Britain or the United States.

Here lies absolute and final equality, and the State, the Law, the Church are bound to guard this equality in the one case and the other with equal force; indeed, those of the lower racial and family types claim even more faithful guardianship than those of the higher, for they can accomplish less for themselves and by themselves.  But the fundamental and inescapable inequality, in intellect, in character, and in capacity, which I insist is one of the conditioning factors in life, is vociferously denied, but ruthlessly enforced, by the people that will be the first to denounce any restatement of what is after all no more than a patent fact.

A little less enthusiasm for shibboleths, and a little more intelligent regard for history and palpable conditions, will show that the assumed equality between men “on the strength of their manhood alone,” the sufficiency of education for correcting the accidental differences that show themselves, and the scheme of life that is worked out along democratic lines on the basis of this essential (or potential) equality, are “fond things vainly imagined” which must be radically modified before the world can begin a sane and wholesome building-up after the great purgation of war.

That equality between men which exists by virtue of the presence in each of an immortal soul, involves an even distribution of justice and the protection of law, without distinction of persons, and an even measure of charity and compassion, but it does not involve the admission of a claim to equality of action or the denial of varied status, since race-values, both of blood and of the gens enter in to establish differences in character, in intelligence and in capacity which cannot be changed by education, environment or heredity within periods which are practical considerations with society.  If we could still hold the old Darwinian dogmas of the origin of species through the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, and if the equally august and authoritative dogma of the transmission by inheritance of acquired characteristics were longer tenable, then perhaps we might invoke faith, hope and patience and continue our generous method of imperilling present society while we fixed our eyes on the vision of that to come when environment,