Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/543

Rh expression over a much wider field, and finally gives character to the whole social system. All rules governing the activities of large or small bodies of men, such as regulations in factories, hospitals and prisons, by-laws in cities, and general laws framed for communities and nations, are manifestly means of providing against unequal acting of individuals—of securing, that is to say, the like acting, under particular and specified circumstances, of all the individuals associated. The sense, early developed, in the individuals of a community that they ought to be equal before the law, with the restiveness which they manifest under all inequalities of its operation; the claim that men shall be politically as well as legally equal; and the demand always made, if not always satisfied, for universal suffrage, first for men, and then for women—at first with limitations of race, property, or sex, and finally without such limitations—all these explain the progress which the world has been making during the last fifty years toward an ideal democracy—toward a condition of ideal political equality between the units that make up a human society as the very condition and means of least resistance between those units.

But men do not remain satisfied with likenesses set up by statute law, with resemblances imposed by a governing body. They aim, more or less consciously, more or less outspokenly, at a common degree of social well-being for all the individuals of a community, and, rightly or wrongly, regard inequalities of wealth, even inequalities of industrial power, as imperfect stages of human development that are to be outgrown. Hence it is that men denounce monopolies, and declare abnormally large accumulations of wealth in private hands to be iniquitous, because inequitous; hence, too, it is that, in the common jealousy of privilege there is to be found every form of hostility to exceptional social power and rank, from the dislike in which it is merely envied to the anger by which it is openly attacked. Socialistic schemes of reform are really schemes for diminishing those inequalities which still offer resistance to the association of men—schemes that is to say, for making men in social, political, and legal relations, in powers, privileges, and responsibilities—more than ever before likes to each other. Even religions illustrate the progress from a belief and acquiescence in special privileges held out to a favored few to an expectation and demand for the salvation of all; for if the pagan had to content himself with the satisfaction of knowing death as the universal leveler, asking with Cicero (Tusculan Disputations) "Can what is necessary for all be a source of misery to one?" the Christian, who claims the equality of all men before God, looks forward to a life hereafter in which all earthly unlikenesses are to be removed.

We shall next note that when unlikes are forced to remain