or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality.  We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool user more and more into the tool owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably borne.  The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immorality, than any existing system.  But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.

But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie.  We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force or fraud.  Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their blood and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, and at the end died for them, who always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism and sound common-sense.  He said (I omit what was of merely local significance): 

I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but that they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects.  They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity.  They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal—­equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  This they said, and this they meant.  They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.  They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all—­constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.

We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means injustice; the inequality of right, of opportunity, of privilege.  We are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far as is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each man shall have