EQUALITY IN A REPUBLIC

MANY people are much disappointed because

it has turned out that our free institutions do not produce equality of condition among the citizens. The motto of the French Revolution was, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"; and it was expected of the American republic that it would prevent the existence of great distinctions in regard to wealth between its citizens, and tend decidedly toward equal conditions for all. An experience of a little over one hundred years has demonstrated that republican institutions do not prevent the existence, on the one hand of a very rich class, and on the other of a very poor class; and that between these two extremes every possible variety of condition may exist. In some respects free institutions do certainly tend to equality. Thus, they make all citizens equal as regards the suffrage, the security of life and property, and the duty of obedience to the laws; they abolish hereditary privileges, such as titles, transmissible offices, monopolies, or sinecures; but they do not interfere

with the accumulation of property, or with the transmission from generation to generation of property and of all that property can procure for its owner.

Looking back on this experience, it seems as if any one might have known from the beginning that a legal state of secure individual liberty could not but produce in the long run great inequalities of condition. The state of society at large under freedom is perfectly illustrated by the condition of things in a university, where the choice of studies is free, and every student is protected and encouraged in developing to the utmost his own gifts and powers. In Harvard University, for example, thousands of students enjoy an almost complete liberty in the selection of their studies, each man being encouraged to select those subjects in which he most easily excels, and consequently finds most enjoyment and most profit. The result is that no two students in the University are pursuing the same subjects with the same success that is, attaining the same intellectual results in the same time. If a student at the beginning of his course has some advantage over his fellows in the study of Latin or chemistry, at the end of four years his advantage will have been greatly increased by the elaborate training in Latin or chemistry which he has procured. The difference between him and his associates in his acquired knowledge of Latin or chemistry will have become greater and greater, and his superior capacity for acquiring a still further knowledge of the subject will be much more

marked at the end of the course than it was at the beginning. As one thousand students that entered together advance through the college, they become more and more unlike in their capacities and attainments, the difference in capacity being much more important than the difference in attainment. This is the inevitable result of the policy of freedom of studies. Under any policy-the most repressive conceivable — it would be impossible to keep the students alike in attainments and capacities during four years, even if they were alike at the start. The only means of turning them out at the end of a four years' course in a tolerably even condition would be to prescribe rigidly the same group of subjects for every student, and to repress in every way possible the unusual gifts of the superior students, while stimulating to the utmost the slow wits of the dullards and sluggards—that is, a despotic government would be required to produce by artificial restrictions some approach to equality of mental condition at graduation.

In American public schools,-in which far too many pupils are placed before one teacher, and a strict grading system is employed as a means of helping her to perform her impossible task,- we have an illustration of the attempt to produce from many hundreds, or even thousands, of children an approximately uniform product representing an average of the bright and the dull. This method does not succeed in producing mental uniformity; and, though it fails to average the chil

dren, the attempt is the greatest evil in American public schools. The manual-training schools, which have come into existence in many communities within the last fifteen years, afford a valuable illustration of the inevitable diversity of mental product even under a discipline intended to be uniform. In such training of the eye and hand as lessons in carpentry, forging, drawing, molding, and turning afford, it proves impossible to keep the different members of a class together in simultaneous exercises. The members of a class started on the same day in forging, for example, soon get separated, simply because one boy can do a great deal more work and better work than another. Some boys are slow to attain any excellence at all in work of eye and hand, while others take naturally to fine handiwork. In every trade the same irrepressible differences between workmen constantly appear. They are differences in physical organization, and also in disposition and will-power; and they last through life, and indeed go on increasing from youth to age. No restrictions have yet been devised which abolish these differences. It may be agreed by workmen in the same trade that a uniform number of hours shall constitute a day's work, and uniform pay be given for that uniform day's work. It may be agreed that no mason shall lay more than a specified number of bricks in a day, or that no compositor shall set more than a specified number of ems in a day; and yet, in spite of these sacrifices of individual liberty, the differences between workmen will remain; and it will be found

that employers exhibit decided preferences in selecting hands, so that this man will always have work and that man will seldom have it. In short, the only way to bring about uniform earning-power is to establish some kind of despotism, or some system of voluntarily assumed restrictions on individual liberty. Under an absolute despotism, such as that of the Sultan of Morocco or the Khalifa of the Sudan, under which all property is held only at the will of the ruler, and every distinction or public station proceeds solely from him, and may be at any moment withdrawn by him, a kind of equality may exist among all the subjects of the despot. There is no freedom to rise, and the man who has been lifted up may at any moment be cast down to the lowest social stage. In dependence on the will of the despot great inequalities of condition may temporarily exist; but they have no security or permanence. Before the one tyrant all subjects are in some sense equal, even military rank being held only at the will of the despot. The subjects of such a government are not free to exercise their different individual capacities, and there results a low, though level, social state.

These familiar illustrations prepare us to accept the proposition that public freedom must result in inequalities of condition among the citizens; and indeed that is just what has happened in our republic. If all the property in the United States should be evenly distributed among all the citizens to-morrow, on the day after to-morrow inequality