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Many writers, and some of them English, have expressed curiosity, if not wonder, at the different fortunes which attended the doctrine of equality in America and in France. The explanation is on the surface, and need not be sought in the fact of a difference of social and political level in the two countries at the start, nor even in the further fact that the colonies were already accustomed to self-government.

The simple truth is that the dogmas of the Declaration were not put into the fundamental law. The Constitution is the most practical state document ever made. It announces no dogmas, proclaims no theories. It accepted society as it was, with its habits and traditions; raising no abstract questions whether men are born free or equal, or how society ought to be organized. It is simply a working compact, made by “the people,” to promote union, establish justice, and secure the blessings of liberty; and the equality is in the assumption of the right of “the people of the United States” to do this. And yet, in a recent number of Blackwood’s Magazine, a writer makes the amusing statement, “I have never met an American who could deny that, while firmly maintaining that the theory was sound which, in the beautiful language of the Constitution, proclaims that all men were born equal, he was,” etc.

An enlightening commentary on the meaning of the Declaration, in the minds of the American statesmen of the period, is furnished by the opinions which some of them expressed upon the French Revolution while it was in progress. Gouverneur Morris, minister to France in 1789, was a conservative republican; Thomas Jefferson was a radical democrat. Both of them had a warm sympathy with the French “people” in the Revolution; both hoped for a republic; both recognized, we may reasonably infer, the sufficient cause of the Revolution in the long-continued corruption of court and nobility, and the intolerable sufferings of the lower orders; and both, we have equal reason to believe, thought that a fair accommodation, short of a dissolution of society, was defeated by the imbecility of the king and the treachery and malignity of a considerable portion of the nobility. The Revolution was not caused by theories, however much it may have been excited or guided by them. But both Morris and Jefferson saw the futility of the application of the abstract dogma of equality and the theories of the Social Contract to the reconstruction of government and the reorganization of society in France.

If the aristocracy were malignant–though numbers of them were far from being so–there was also a malignant prejudice aroused against them, and M. Taine is not far wrong when he says of this prejudice, “Its hard, dry kernel consists of the abstract idea of equality.”–[The French Revolution. By H. A. Taine. Vol. i., bk. ii., chap. ii., sec. iii. Translation. New York: Henry Holt & Co.]–Taine’s French Revolution is cynical, and, with all its accumulation of material, omits some facts necessary to a philosophical history; but a passage following that quoted is worth reproducing in this connection: “The treatment of the nobles of the Assembly is the same as the treatment of the Protestants by Louis XIV. . . . One hundred thousand Frenchmen driven out at the end of the seventeenth century, and one hundred thousand driven out at the end of the eighteenth! Mark how an intolerant democracy completes the work of an intolerant monarchy! The moral aristocracy was mowed down in the name of uniformity; the social aristocracy is mowed down in the name of equality. For the second time an abstract principle, and with the same effect, buries its blade in the heart of a living society.”

Notwithstanding the world-wide advertisement of the French experiment, it has taken almost a century for the dogma of equality, at least outside of France, to filter down from the speculative thinkers into a general popular acceptance, as an active principle to be used in the shaping of affairs, and to become more potent in the popular mind than tradition or habit. The attempt is made to apply it to society with a brutal logic; and we might despair as to the result, if we did not know that the world is not ruled by logic. Nothing is so fascinating in the hands of the half-informed as a neat dogma; it seems the perfect key to all difficulties. The formula is applied in contempt and ignorance of the past, as if building up were as easy as pulling down, and as if society were a machine to be moved by mechanical appliances, and not a living organism composed of distinct and sensitive beings. Along with the spread of a belief in the uniformity of natural law has unfortunately gone a suggestion of parallelism of the moral law to it, and a notion that if we can discover the right formula, human society and government can be organized with a mathematical justice to all the parts. By many the dogma of equality is held to be that formula, and relief from the greater evils of the social state is expected from its logical extension.