Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/793

Rh way as can be devised to get political questions settled, yet that, theoretically, the despotism of a majority is as little justifiable and as dangerous as that of one man; and yet another, that voting power, as a means of giving effect to opinion, is more likely to prove a curse than a blessing to the voters, unless that opinion is the result of a sound judgment operating upon sound knowledge. Some experience of sea-life leads me to think that I should be very sorry to find myself on board a ship in which the voices of the cook and the loblolly boys counted for as much as those of the officers, upon a question of steering, or reefing topsails; or where the "great heart" of the crew was called upon to settle the ship's course. And there is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics—none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

The conclusion of the whole matter, then, would seem to be that the doctrine that all men are, in any sense, or have been, at any time, free and equal, is an utterly baseless fiction. Nor does the proposition fare much better if we modify it, so as to say that all men ought to be free and equal, so long as the "ought" poses as a command of immutable morality. For, assuredly, it is not intuitively certain "that all men ought to be free and equal" Therefore, if it is to be justified at all a priori, it must be deducible from some proposition which is intuitively certain; and unfortunately none is forthcoming. For the proposition that men ought to be free to do what they please, so long as they do not infringe on the equal rights of other men, assumes that men have equal rights and can not be used to prove that assumption. And if, instead of appealing to philosophy, we turn to revealed religion, I am not aware that either Judaism or Christianity affirms the political freedom or the political equality of men in Rousseau's sense. They affirm the equality of men before God—but that is an equality either of insignificance or of imperfection.

With the demonstration that men are not all equal under whatever aspect they are contemplated, and that the assumption that they ought to be considered equal has no sort of a priori foundation—however much it may, in reference to positive law, with due limitations, be justifiable by considerations of practical expediency the bottom of Rousseau's argument, from a priori ethical assumptions to the denial of the right of an individual to hold private property, falls out. For Rousseau, with more logical consistency than some of those who have come after him, puts the land and its produce upon the same footing. "Vous êtes perdus si vous oubliez que les fruits sont à tous, et que la terre n'est á personne," says he. (You are lost if you forget that the fruits are for all and the land is not for any one.)