If the aristocracy were malignant—­though numbers of them were far from being so—­there was also a malignant prejudice aroused against them, and M. Taine is not far wrong when he says of this prejudice, “Its hard, dry kernel consists of the abstract idea of equality.”—­[The French Revolution.  By H. A. Taine.  Vol. i., bk. ii., chap. ii., sec. iii.  Translation.  New York:  Henry Holt & Co.]—­Taine’s French Revolution is cynical, and, with all its accumulation of material, omits some facts necessary to a philosophical history; but a passage following that quoted is worth reproducing in this connection:  “The treatment of the nobles of the Assembly is the same as the treatment of the Protestants by Louis XIV. . . .  One hundred thousand Frenchmen driven out at the end of the seventeenth century, and one hundred thousand driven out at the end of the eighteenth!  Mark how an intolerant democracy completes the work of an intolerant monarchy!  The moral aristocracy was mowed down in the name of uniformity; the social aristocracy is mowed down in the name of equality.  For the second time an abstract principle, and with the same effect, buries its blade in the heart of a living society.”

Notwithstanding the world-wide advertisement of the French experiment, it has taken almost a century for the dogma of equality, at least outside of France, to filter down from the speculative thinkers into a general popular acceptance, as an active principle to be used in the shaping of affairs, and to become more potent in the popular mind than tradition or habit.  The attempt is made to apply it to society with a brutal logic; and we might despair as to the result, if we did not know that the world is not ruled by logic.  Nothing is so fascinating in the hands of the half-informed as a neat dogma; it seems the perfect key to all difficulties.  The formula is applied in contempt and ignorance of the past, as if building up were as easy as pulling down, and as if society were a machine to be moved by mechanical appliances, and not a living organism composed of distinct and sensitive beings.  Along with the spread of a belief in the uniformity of natural law has unfortunately gone a suggestion of parallelism of the moral law to it, and a notion that if we can discover the right formula, human society and government can be organized with a mathematical justice to all the parts.  By many the dogma of equality is held to be that formula, and relief from the greater evils of the social state is expected from its logical extension.

Let us now consider some of the present movements and tendencies that are related, more or less, to this belief: 

I. Absolute equality is seen to depend upon absolute supremacy of the state.  Professor Henry Fawcett says, “Excessive dependence on the state is the most prominent characteristic of modern socialism.”  “These proposals to prohibit inheritance, to abolish private property, and to make the state the owner of all the capital and the administrator of the entire industry of the country are put forward as representing socialism in its ultimate and highest development.”—­["Socialism in Germany and the United States,” Fortnightly Review, November, 1878.]