but insists that moralists and statesmen have always led us wrong by legislating and prescribing conduct on the false theory that man is bad, whereas he is in truth a creature endowed with natural probity.  Then he strikes to the root of society with a directness that Rousseau could not imitate, by the position that “these laws by establishing a monstrous division of the products of nature, and even of their very elements—­by dividing what ought to have remained entire, or ought to have been restored to entireness if any accident had divided them, aided and favoured the break-up of all sociability.”  All political and all moral evils are the effects of this pernicious cause—­private property.  He says of Rousseau’s first Discourse that the writer ought to have seen that the corruption of manners which he set down to literature and art really came from this venomous principle of property, which infects all that it touches.[178] Christianity, it is true, assailed this principle and restored equality or community of possessions, but Christianity had the radical fault of involving such a detachment from earthly affections, in order to deliver ourselves to heavenly meditation, as brought about a necessary degeneration in social activity.  The form of government is a matter of indifference, provided you can only assure community of goods.  Political revolutions are at bottom the clash of material interests, and until you have equalised the one you will never prevent the other.[179]

Let us turn from this very definite position to one of the least definite productions to be found in all literature.

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It will seem a little odd that more than half of a discussion on the origin of inequality among men should be devoted to a glowing imaginary description, from which no reader could conjecture what thesis it was designed to support.  But we have only to remember that Rousseau’s object was to persuade people that the happier state is that in which inequality does not subsist, that there had once been such a state, and that this was first the state of nature, and then the state only one degree removed from it, in which we now find the majority of savage tribes.  At the outset he defines inequality as a word meaning two different things; one, natural or physical inequality, such as difference of age, of health, of physical strength, of attributes of intelligence and character; the other, moral or political inequality, consisting in difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment of the rest, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful.  The former differences are established by nature, the latter are authorised, if they were not established, by the consent of men.[180] In the state of nature no inequalities flow from the differences among men in point of physical advantage and disadvantage, and which remain without derivative differences so long as the state of nature endures undisturbed.  Nature deals with men as the law of Sparta dealt with the children of its citizens; she makes those who are well constituted strong and robust, and she destroys all the rest.