no such ambiguity.  He accepts the doctrine that men are formed by laws, but holds that they are by nature good, and that laws, by establishing a division of the products of nature, broke up the sociability of men, and that all political and moral evils are the result of private property.  Political inequality is an accident of inequality of possessions, and the renovation of the latter lies in the abolition of the former.

The opening sentence of the Contrat-Social is, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is a slave,” a statement which it is difficult to reconcile with the fact that every human being is born helpless, dependent, and into conditions of subjection, conditions that we have no reason to suppose were ever absent from the race.  But Rousseau never said, “All men are born equal.”  He recognized, as we have seen, natural inequality.  What he held was that the artificial differences springing from the social union were disproportionate to the capacities springing from the original constitution; and that society, as now organized, tends to make the gulf wider between those who have privileges and those who have none.

The well-known theory upon which Rousseau’s superstructure rests is that society is the result of a compact, a partnership between men.  They have not made an agreement to submit their individual sovereignty to some superior power, but they have made a covenant of brotherhood.  It is a contract of association.  Men were, and ought to be, equal cooperators, not only in politics, but in industries and all the affairs of life.  All the citizens are participants in the sovereign authority.  Their sovereignty is inalienable; power may be transmitted, but not will; if the people promise to obey, it dissolves itself by the very act—­if there is a master, there is no longer a people.  Sovereignty is also indivisible; it cannot be split up into legislative, judiciary, and executive power.

Society being the result of a compact made by men, it followed that the partners could at any time remake it, their sovereignty being inalienable.  And this the French socialists, misled by a priori notions, attempted to do, on the theory of the Contrat-Social, as if they had a tabula rasa, without regarding the existing constituents of society, or traditions, or historical growths.

Equality, as a phrase, having done duty as a dissolvent, was pressed into service as a constructor.  As this is not so much an essay on the nature of equality is an attempt to indicate some of the modern tendencies to carry out what is illusory in the dogma, perhaps enough has been said of this period.  Mr. Morley very well remarks that the doctrine of equality as a demand for a fair chance in the world is unanswerable; but that it is false when it puts him who uses his chance well on the same level with him who uses it ill.  There is no doubt that when Condorcet said, “Not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the social art,” he uttered the sentiments of the socialists of the Revolution.