But the principle of equal rights, like the principle of ultimate popular political responsibility, is not sufficient; and because of its insufficiency results in certain dangerous ambiguities and self-contradictions.  American political thinkers have always repudiated the idea that by equality of rights they meant anything like equality of performance or power.  The utmost varieties of individual power and ability are bound to exist and are bound to bring about many different levels of individual achievement.  Democracy both recognizes the right of the individual to use his powers to the utmost, and encourages him to do so by offering a fair field and, in cases of success, an abundant reward.  The democratic principle requires an equal start in the race, while expecting at the same time an unequal finish.  But Americans who talk in this way seem wholly blind to the fact that under a legal system which holds private property sacred there may be equal rights, but there cannot possibly be any equal opportunities for exercising such rights.  The chance which the individual has to compete with his fellows and take a prize in the race is vitally affected by material conditions over which he has no control.  It is as if the competitor in a Marathon cross country run were denied proper nourishment or proper training, and was obliged to toe the mark against rivals who had every benefit of food and discipline.  Under such conditions he is not as badly off as if he were entirely excluded from the race.  With the aid of exceptional strength and intelligence he may overcome the odds against him and win out.  But it would be absurd to claim, because all the rivals toed the same mark, that a man’s victory or defeat depended exclusively on his own efforts.  Those who have enjoyed the benefits of wealth and thorough education start with an advantage which can be overcome only in very exceptional men,—­men so exceptional, in fact, that the average competitor without such benefits feels himself disqualified for the contest.

Because of the ambiguity indicated above, different people with different interests, all of them good patriotic Americans, draw very different inferences from the doctrine of equal rights.  The man of conservative ideas and interests means by the rights, which are to be equally exercised, only those rights which are defined and protected by the law—­the more fundamental of which are the rights to personal freedom and to private property.  The man of radical ideas, on the other hand, observing, as he may very clearly, that these equal rights cannot possibly be made really equivalent to equal opportunities, bases upon the same doctrine a more or less drastic criticism of the existing economic and social order and sometimes of the motives of its beneficiaries and conservators.  The same principle, differently interpreted, is the foundation of American political orthodoxy and American political heterodoxy.  The same measure of reforming