Democracy is contained in the triple statement that men are born free, equal, and in brotherhood; and in this formula it is the middle term that is cardinal, and the root of all.  Yet it is the doctrine of the equality of man, by virtue of the human nature with which he is clothed entire at birth, that is most attacked, as an obvious absurdity, and provocative more of laughter than of argument.  What, then, is this equality which democracy affirms as the true state of all men among themselves?  It is our common human nature, that identity of the soul in all men, which was first inculcated by the preaching of Christ’s death for all equally, whence it followed that every human soul was of equal value in the eyes of God, its Creator, and had the same title to the rites of the Christian Church, and the same blessedness of an infinite immortality in the world to come; thence we derived it from the very fountain of our faith, and the first true democracy was that which levelled king and peasant, barbarian and Roman, in the communion of our Lord.  Yet nature laughs at us, and ordains such inequalities at birth itself as make our peremptory charter of the value of men’s souls seem a play of fancy.  There are men of almost divine intelligence, men of almost devilish instincts, men of more or less clouded mind; and they are such at birth, so deeply has nature stamped into them heredity, circumstance, and the physical conditions of sanity, morality and wholesomeness, in the body which is her work.  Such differences do exist, and conditions vary the world over, whence nature, which accumulates inequalities in the struggle for life, “with ravin shrieks against our creed.”  But we have not now to learn for the first time that nature, though not the enemy of the human spirit, is indifferent to all the soul has erected in man’s own realm, peculiar to humanity.  What has nature contributed to the doctrine of freedom or of fraternity?  Man’s life to her is all one, tyrant or slave, friend or foe, wise or foolish, virtuous or vicious, holy or profane, so long as her imperative physical conditions of life, the mortal thing, are conformed to; society itself is not her care, nor civilization, nor anything that belongs to man above the brute.  Her word, consequently, need not disturb us; she is not our oracle.  It rather belongs to us to win further victory over her, if it may be, by our intelligence, and control her vital, as we are now coming to control her material, powers and their operation.

This equality which democracy affirms—­the identity of the soul, the sameness of its capacities of energy, knowledge, and enjoyment—­draws after it as a consequence the soul’s right to opportunity for self-development by virtue of which it may possess itself of what shall be its own fulness of life.  In the inscrutable mystery of this world, the soul at birth enters on an unequal struggle, made such both by inherent conditions and by external limitations, in individuals, classes, and races; but the determination