“Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great, his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree, that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him below that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless without ceasing the happy moment which rescued him from it for ever, and out of a stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a man."[176] The little parenthesis as to the frequent degradation produced by the abuses of the social condition, does not prevent us from recognising in the whole passage a tolerably complete surrender of the main position which was taken up in the two Discourses.  The short treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry into the just foundations and most proper form of that very political society, which the Discourses showed to have its foundation in injustice, and to be incapable of receiving any form proper for the attainment of the full measure of human happiness.

Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and defined.  Locke’s influence has begun to tell.  The two principal objects of every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and equality.  By equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees of power and wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect of power, such power should be out of reach of any violence, and be invariably exercised in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches, that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to sell himself.  Do you say this equality is a mere chimera?  It is precisely because the force of things is constantly tending to destroy equality, that the force of legislation ought as constantly to be directed towards upholding it.[177] This is much clearer than the indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the second Discourse.  It means neither more nor less than that equality before the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free community.

The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the tendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions among different members of a society, is too vague to be criticised.  Does it cover and warrant so sweeping a measure as the old seisachtheia of Solon, voiding all contracts in which the debtor had pledged his land or his person; or such measures as the agrarian laws of Licinius and the Gracchi?  Or is it to go no further than to condemn such a law as that which in England gives unwilled lands to the eldest son?  We can only criticise accurately a general idea of this sort in connection with specific projects in which it is applied.  As it stands, it is no more than the expression of what the author thinks a wise principle of public policy.  It assumes the existence of property just as completely