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 594 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

single individual could adequately represent all ; but this only suggests that the doctrine of equality really means the partici- pation of all in what is indeed a common life, that is, a life single and indivisible, but in what has been also a life requiring and recognizing individual differentiation. Equality, as a con- dition actual in a society whose members are living wholly as if in another world, a spiritual somewhere, where the differences of earth are as nothing, does justify monarchy ; it justifies mon- archy by heavenly sanction and worldly might ; but the modern doctrine of equality, instead of being an unworldly, spiritual apology for the differences of this earthly life, has been a demand for the mediation of differences, always affording a ground upon which men or states could agree to differ. It has meant, not monarchy, life in another world, and militarism, but community of opportunity, or right of personal or national individuality, division of labor, the organization of differences ; and to argue from it, as men are doing constantly, now to extreme communalism and now to extreme individualism, may be to emphasize its fictitious character or its ambiguity, but it is not to appreciate its whole meaning. Community of property, for example, as if a corollary from the doctrine of equality, really means, not a literally common ownership of all things, separately or collectively, but an organized ownership, that is, an individual ownership which has sanction only in social utility, exactly as is implied in division of labor, free trade, and the like. And for further evidence of the significance of equality consider how the right of constitutional amendment, the pro- vision for recognition or representation of minorities, the insti- tution of equity in jurisprudence, 1 and the conception of an indivisible sovereignty, which are all necessary in a social con- tract, and no one of which is wholly neglected in any modern constitution, are at once sanctions of differentiation in the life of humanity and conclusions from the principle of equality. As has been indicated already, the rise of limited monarchies,

1 The courts in equity had their origin in the King's Bench, in the legal supremacy of the sovereign, and they have always given elasticity to the law, involving a more or less conscious appeal from legal to natural rights.