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.]

Society and government should be recast till they conform to the theory, or, let us say, to its exaggerations.  Men can unmake what they have made.  There is no higher authority anywhere than the will of the majority, no matter what the majority is in intellect and morals.  Fifty-one ignorant men have a natural right to legislate for the one hundred, as against forty-nine intelligent men.

All men being equal, one man is as fit to legislate and execute as another.  A recently elected Congressman from Maine vehemently repudiated in a public address, as a slander, the accusation that he was educated.  The theory was that, uneducated, he was the proper representative of the average ignorance of his district, and that ignorance ought to be represented in the legislature in kind.  The ignorant know better what they want than the educated know for them.  “Their education [that of college men] destroys natural perception and judgment; so that cultivated people are one-sided, and their judgment is often inferior to that of the working people.”  “Cultured people have made up their minds, and are hard to move.”  “No lawyer should be elected to a place in any legislative body.”—­[Opinions of working-men, reported in “The Nationals, their Origin and their Aims,” The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1878.]