Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/173

 of the negation serve it is a midwife, although it originated twenty years prior to the birth of Hegel. Far from being ashamed of this it bears in plain sight the stamp of its dialectic derivation in its earliest manifestation. In a state of nature and savagery men were equal, and, since Rousseau regards speech as a falsifying of natural conditions, he is quite right in predicating equality of animals of one species as far as this reaches, and the same also with regard to those speechless animal-men, recently hypothetically classified by Haeckel as Alali. But these equal animal men had one quality beyond the other animals,—perfectibility, the power of further development and this was the reason of inequality. Rousseau sees therefore in the existence of equality a step forward. But this advance was self contradictory, it was at the same time a retrogression. "All further advances (beyond the primitive stage) were so many steps, seemingly in the development of individual men, but actually in the decay of the species. Working in metals and agriculture were the two arts whose discovery brought about this great revolution" (the transformation of the primitive forests into cultivated lands, but also the introduction of poverty and slavery together with private property). "The poets hold that gold and silver, the philosophers that iron and corn have civilised men and ruined the human race." Each new advance of civilisation is at the same time an advance of inequality. All contrivances with which society endows itself by means of civilisation are in direct opposition to their original purpose. "It is beyond question and a foundation principle of the entire public law that people made rulers to defend their liberties, not to destroy them." And yet these rulers become of necessity the oppressors of the people and they carry the oppression to the point