If the religion of Christ should ever be acclimated on earth, the result would not be the removal of hardships and suffering, or of the necessity of self-sacrifice; but the bitterness and discontent at unequal conditions would measurably disappear.  At the bar of Christianity the poor man is the equal of the rich, and the learned of the unlearned, since intellectual acquisition is no guarantee of moral worth.  The content that Christianity would bring to our perturbed society would come from the practical recognition of the truth that all conditions may be equally honorable.  The assertion of the dignity of man and of labor is, we imagine, the sum and substance of the equality and communism of the New Testament.  But we are to remember that this is not merely a “gospel for the poor.”

Whatever the theories of the ancient world were, the development of democratic ideas is sufficiently marked in the fifteenth century, and even in the fourteenth, to rob the eighteenth of the credit of originating the doctrine of equality.  To mention only one of the early writers,—­[For copious references to authorities on the spread of communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and women in four periods of the world’s history—­namely, at the time of the decline of Greece, in the degeneration of the Roman republic, among the moderns in the age of the Reformation, and again in our own day—­see Roscher’s Political Economy, notes to Section LXXIX., et seq.] —­Marsilio, a physician of Padua, in 1324, said that the laws ought to be made by all the citizens; and he based this sovereignty of the people upon the greater likelihood of laws being better obeyed, and also being good laws, when they were made by the whole body of the persons affected.

In 1750 and 1753, J. J. Rousseau published his two discourses on questions proposed by the Academy of Dijon:  “Has the Restoration of Sciences Contributed to Purify or to Corrupt Manners?” and “What is the Origin of Inequality among Men, and is it Authorized by Natural Law?” These questions show the direction and the advance of thinking on social topics in the middle of the eighteenth century.  Rousseau’s Contrat-Social and the novel Emile were published in 1761.

But almost three-quarters of a century before, in 1690, John Locke published his two treatises on government.  Rousseau was familiar with them.  Mr. John Morley, in his admirable study of Rousseau, [Rousseau.  By John Morley.  London:  Chapman & Hall. 1873—­I have used it freely in the glance at this period.]—­fully discusses the latter’s obligation to Locke; and the exposition leaves Rousseau little credit for originality, but considerable for illogical misconception.  He was, in fact, the most illogical of great men, and the most inconsistent even of geniuses.  The Contrat-Social is a reaction in many things from the discourses, and Emile is almost an entire reaction, especially in the theory of education, from both.