ears 7 43 eer Causes Ase oi Li? eaves BEE pee arly - Ane Aetee “tet Aen Ga ase Aaah spars aa = eretisees Cea eae Hateiom Sets a rr Hates: ekigs YEN OP Ntkgi 5 a 5 eee Hee wets estate ais auGsh eae pCoEre BREN, Md, ESS Seine 4 aie ee oaG Raed cy Paes ile dle ata 2 te tearg at eeS oi Tree res ate a noie\3 eeeg si ast rs tres Pgh canes 3 riers Phone eee mene 5 pk. cs eon pea Pes Ee fists ree Kh 4) Se WES psa e shes ab tor ee et —University of Virginia Library HM146 S6 1927 TN 7 i,LO LPT O NEP ONY i eres a oe Sek sretne sre rae Peeps meak ttre ne berrstcbopes heap ncopese en * a Se legates Ri f Bohne aitareshen bis ReTHE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY OF EQUALITY By T. V.SMITH Equality, in its present vague status, has lost much of the meaning that the founders of this country attached to it. In his book Mr, Smith has set out, in effect, to rescue from oblivion whatever truth the earlier doctrine contained, If the concept of equality is to continue in the fundamental place it has held in our political, religious, and social assump- tions, it must certainly be restated in terms more applicable to current situations. “Per- haps men are not actually equal,” writes Mr. Smith, “‘but even so, they ought to be treated more equally than they now are, for in that way they really can be made more equal.” $3.00THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY OF EQUALITYTHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO., NEW YORK; THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED, TORONTO; THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON; THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA, TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI; THE COMMERCIAL PRESS, LIMITED, SHANGHAI,THE AMERICAN PHI- LOSOPHY of EQUALITY BY TE VeSMiERE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO elas gt ita ign WAExco ae) ee (es latuy ree THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. + » CHICAGO, ILLINOISCOPYRIGHT 1927 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO AND PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS IN OCTOBER 1927. COMPOSED AND PRINTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.TON.P.S.S.PREFACE DEALS, like men, should be judged against the background of their pre- tensions. As over against fact-words, “equality” is an emotive-term. A factual connotation has not always been denied the word; indeed, such has at times been af- firmed. But the primary pretension of the term has not been either to affirm or to deny facts but rather to bestir feeling and to initiate action. To say so ought not to belittle its function. Certain it is, however, that this use has tended to inhibit impartial evaluation of the claim of equality. Wheth- er for this reason or for another, the critt- cal consideration that the concept of equal- ity has received in America is not at all commensurate with the fundamental place it has held in our political and religious and social assumptions. In early America the claim of equality rested on an inherited philosophy of natural rights; but that it rested on something more also is suggested vulvill PREFACE by the fact that the belief in equality out- lived that dogma. In this new land where food for all depended upon the labor of all, obvious inequalities were impracticable. But as fast as Americans could with impunt- ty rear a structure of social inequality, they did so. Central, however, both to the philos- ophy of natural rights before, and to its early successors in theory after, the downfall of slavery, was a conception of human na- ture that made the core of personality some- thing transcendentally derived and in fact and by right immune from any thorough- going social transformation. But now that, following Darwin and the creation of the social sciences, the human individual is held to be socially constituted, whatever truth there was in the earlier doc- trine of equality must be stated in terms more adequate to our present insight or be lost to the social process. We cannot afford to lose so effective a weapon of protest as this claim has proved itself to be, least of all at the very time when universal equali- zation of men and particularly now of wom- en in politics might make their undying protest against injustice effective in thePREFACE 1X field of economics. The claim can be made more fruitful than heretofore only by truer insight into human nature, of which the claim is predicated. Individuality given to the social process is a fiction; individuality acquired in the process is real. Men are what they function as. The appeal to the practi- cal fruits of the claim of equality for its jus- tification rather than to the metaphysical or theological roots of individuality is here emphasized; and equality is held to be justi- fiable as a claim of right, apart from any arguments based upon the metaphysical nature of man. If men are not actually equal, they nevertheless ought to be treated more equally than they now are, as regards access to education, distribution of economic opportunities and goods, and participation in other privileges. In defense of this “ought” it is argued that human nature is dynamic, that by such treatment men can actually be made more equal than they are, that such equality is desirable because it conditions co-operation, that some measure of co-operation is prerequisite to any human life at all, and that a maximum of co-opera- tion is the sine gua non of that good life tox PREFACE which the social prophets and spiritual seers of mankind have long pointed the way. Acknowledgments are due the South- western Political and Social Science Quar- terly, which published part of chapter 11, and the International Fournal of Ethics, which published portions of chapters iv, v, and vi, later revised for appearance in this volume. For helpful suggestions upon the man- uscript, and otherwise, I owe a heavy debt, both to former colleagues at the University of Texas and to present colleagues at the University of Chicago. Among the former are Professors A. B. Wolfe, A. P. Brogan, G. W. Cunningham, C. W. Ramsdell, Ben F. Wright, and C. M. Perry. Among the latter are Professors G. H. Mead, James H. Tufts, and William E. Dodd. Especial thanks are due Professor Charles E. Merrt- am, Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, who reached a helpful hand beyond departmental boundaries initially to inspire this study, throughout to encourage progress, and even- tually to criticize the finished product. Wits: UNIVERSITY oF CHICAGO Memoria Day, 1927CONTENTS I. Equatiry AND THE DecLaRaTIoN OF IN- DEPENDENCE. 3008000 3 Il. SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE oF EQUALITY. Ill. Woman’s RIGHTS AND THE AMERICAN DocTRINE OF EQUALITY IV. EQuaLITARIANISM IN QUEST OF A PHIL- OSOPHY V. NEweER VIEWS OF INDIVIDUALITY AS PHIL- OSOPHIC BASES FOR EQUALITY VI. Tue FuncrionAL INTERPRETATION OF EQuaALITY. AppenpIx A. THE SENECA FAtis DECLARA- TION OF SENTIMENTS AppENDIx B. RESOLUTIONS ADOPTED BY THE SENECA FALLS CONVENTION . - « = UNDEXG 2% ci os ow ek he es xi 35 85 130) Igo - 250 327 332 335CHAPTERS EQUALITY AND THE DECLARA- TION OF INDEPENDENCE HE early American doctrine of equality, officially expressed in 1776," had its basis (1) somewhat in Amer- ican conditions of living, (2) more in the kind of people who came as colonists, but (3) most consciously of all in religious and polit- cal theories long evolving out of European conditions. J It was De Tocqueville? who, first of all observers from abroad and perhaps most of all, was impressed by the compelling nature t The two best-known forms being in the Declaration of In- dependence, “All men are created equal. ... ,” and, almost a month earlier, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, “All men are >> by nature equally free and independent..... 2“The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the funda- mental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated” (Democracy in America, I, Introduction, p. 1). I2 AMERICAN EQUALITY of American conditions of life. There was throughout the world, thought he, an irre- sistible impetus toward equality (with which he identified democracy) ;t but hostile conditions both social and natural would long delay its realization in Europe. In America, on the other hand, he saw Nature in league with the universal force making for equality. What was inevitable, but dis- tant for the Old World had, therefore, come naturally and quickly in the New World. Like tobacco, democracy had been found indigenous to American soil. Even the American Indians, ‘“‘although they are ig- norant and poor, are equal and free.’” “The soil of America was opposed to a ter- ritorial aristocracy.’ “Thus, as the condi- tion of society was democratic, the rule of democracy was established without difh- culty.’’* So pervasive was this spirit, as he thought, that “Democracy has gradually penetrated into their customs, their opin- ions, and their forms of social intercourse: t [bid., Introduction. 2 Democracy in America, 1, 27. 3 Ibid., p. 35- 4 Tbid., p. 409.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE _ 3 it is to be found in all the details of daily life, as well as in the laws.’ What De Tocqueville saw already ac- complished in America in the first part of the nineteenth century others had in earlier days vaguely foreseen. Colonists who came expecting to make America a New England in fact as well as in name (and there were many such) were yet to learn that, though man proposes, nature often disposes. Gen- eral Carleton voiced this truth out of an experience, enlightening if somewhat disap- pointing, when in a letter he declared: It may not be improper here to observe that the British form of government transplanted into this continent never will produce the same fruits as at home, chiefly because it is impossible for the dignity of the throne or of the peerage to be represented in the American forests. Hardly more true of politics than of man’s various other interests, was the General’s observation. The imperative that those who would not work should not eat was not more a command of Captain John Smith than a law of Nature, this implacable nature t [bid., p. 413. 2 Andrews, The Colonial Period, p. 151. (Italics mine.)4 AMERICAN EQUALITY that either would be conquered by man or would conquer him. And as in the presence of this stern task there was no assured let- sure, so also there was a strange, almost lu- dicrous, unfitness about all the social equt- page that under other conditions served to give prestige to a leisure class." “To bring that refractory land into cultivation,” says De Tocqueville, “the constant and inter- ested exertions of the owner himself were necessary; and when the ground was pre- pared, its produce was found to be insuffi- cient to enrich a proprietor and a farmer at the same time.’” Indeed, as Turner observes, The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization, and arrays him in the hunting shirt and smoccasifiegss) 1 In short, at the frontier the 1 Connecticut enacted a statute in 1679 penalizing with taxa- tion on an “150 pound estate” all who displayed conspicuous adornment or “other superfluous trimmings” in dress, because “excess in apparell amongst us is unbecoming a wilderness and the profession of the gospell” (Weeden, Economic History of New England, I, 288). 2 Democracy in America, I, 35.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE 5 environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish." This description has peculiar force as ap- plied to the first colonists. Progressively the receding frontier became frontier to an ever more accessible and ever more sufficient back-country; but, due to uncertainties of ocean travel, the very first settlements in America were severely detached; they were frontiers to the bleak Atlantic. Under such conditions, irrespective of the character of the colonists, a liberal practice of equality was sure to arise. When the inhabitants are few and their common alternative is to win a living or perish, co-operation is a neces- sity; co-operation implies a working equal- ity; and practice tends to produce a theory compatible with it. I] This tendency toward equality, indige- nous in the very physical conditions, was strengthened, moreover, by the kind of col- onists who first came to America. Taking the early colonists all in all, there was, of course, generous variety among them. “The t Turner, The Frontier in American History, pp. 3; 4-6 AMERICAN EQUALITY people were of many origins, many minds, many varieties of temper, and grades of mental activity; and, as was to be expected, they differed very widely in their ideas on religion, conduct, and morals. They were Puritans, and Anglicans; they were English, French, German, and Scots.”* But with this variety, there was also a very real homo- geneity. As De Tocqueville observed, “whilst the hierarchy of rank despotically classed the inhabitants of the mother coun- try, the colony approximated more and more the novel spectacle of a community homogeneous in all its parts.” The men of wealth, the political leaders, the social élite, would hardly face an uncertain ocean and a more uncertain continent in order to hazard what was for them already secure. Some such personages did interest themselves in America; but for the most part their interest went no farther than to obtain grants of land, organize companies, and then send others to face the perils of the New World. Even such participation as this grew less frequent as it became evident, through re- t Andrews, Colonial Folkways, p. 232. 2 Democracy in America, I, 43.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE 7 peated discouragements, that America’s gold must first be found and mined before it could be minted.t A few gallant gentle- men-adventurers like Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, moved perhaps primarily by motives other than economic, persisted even to their own economic detri- ment in efforts to get America settled. But all such were notable exceptions. “Those who sought for permanent homes proved better colonizers than those whose chief aim was to promote plantations for personal pride and commercial advantage.’” Those who actually settled America, though dif- fering in countless other ways, were from the same economic stratum; they were men, who having once succeeded, had failed, or men who, like the great majority, had never succeeded at all. ‘““The prosperous preferred to remain at home, and the colonizing com- t Becker, Beginnings of the American People, p. 47. 2 “Those who looked to America for great financial profit or immediate political advantage were disappointed. The seven- teenth century had run half its course before the colonies became an important asset to the English government; no gold came from them to enrich its treasury, few supplies to furnish its navy, while the revenue derived from its slowly growing trade was insignifi- cant” (Becker, op. cit., p. 47. Cf. also, Andrews, The Colonial Pe- riod, p. 42.)8 AMERICAN EQUALITY panies had to take any that could be got of any sort on any terms.” The glowing accounts which reached England ap- pealed to those of every class whose straitened cir- cumstances or unsatisfied ambitions disposed them to a hazard of new fortunes. The yeoman farmer, whose income was small and whose children would re- main yeomen; the lawyer and the physician, the mer- chant and the clergyman, ambitious to become land- owners and play the gentlemen; younger sons of the country gentry, for whom there were no assured ave- nues of advancement: these felt the call of the New World. Fretted by social restrictions, or pinched by rising standards of living, they saw Virginia in the light of their ideals, and were willing to exchange a safe but restricted position for the chance of eco- nomic and social enfranchisement.* The Separatist immigrants, almost with- out exception, and the Puritan immigrants of New England, in spite of relative ex- ceptions, belonged also to the dispossessed class. The economic motive, the universal hunger for land, was not thought incompati- ble with their avowed pilgrimage to a better world. If they regarded a land where they might have religious freedom as their su- preme good here on earth, they, neverthe- t Becker, op. ctt., p. 70.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE 9 less, like Kant, had devotion left for a com- plete good—religious freedom crowned with economic prosperity.’ Whether, then, the colonists were reli- gious refugees, as in New England and Penn- sylvania, or hired men working under mar- tial law, as in early Virginia, or indentured servants, as in the case of so many of the early German immigrants, or the thrifty, but for the most part poor, Scotch-Irish that came later—they were such Europeans as had more to expect from chances cast in unexplored America than from chances con- tinued in their already exploited homelands. They were such persons as the home country was more often than not glad to be rid of.’ «Cf, Winthrop’s quaint comparison of the relative advan- tages of the Old and the New World. “The land grows weary of her inhabitants, soe as man is heer of less price amongst us than a horse or sheep. ... . We stand here striving for place of habita- tion (many men spending as much labour and cost to recover or keep sometimes an acre or two of land as would procure them many hundred as good or better in another country) and in ye mean tyme suffer a whole continent as fruitful and convenient for the use of man to lie waste without any improvement” (quoted from ibid., pp- 94, 95). 2In regard to colonizing the West Indies, it was remarked in England of that day that “by taking off one useless person, for such generally go abroad, we add twenty blacks to the labour and manufactures of the Nation.” (Italics mine.)IO AMERICAN EQUALITY As Andrews has concisely delineated them: The colonists were not conservative, satisfied and prosperous Englishmen; they were as a rule the dis- contented and restless adventurers, the poor, the vagrant, and even those of the criminal class,‘ or else they were those whose views of government and re- ligion did not accord with the practices which pre- vailed in England.” While this description is meant only for English colonists, it does no injustice to col- onists other than English. III These two impulses toward equality De Tocqueville has well summarized in his ob- servation that, ““The happy and the power- ful do not go into exile, and there are no surer 1 The deportation to the colonies (especially to Maryland and Virginia) of actual criminals, chiefly non-political too, was so com- mon as to arouse vigorous protests on both sides of the Atlantic. Francis Bacon declared that “‘it is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people and wicked condemned men to be the people with whom you plant” (Essay of Plantations). and the Virginia Assembly in 1617 prohibited the importation of convicts (though the prohibition was overruled by the king). Whatever the total number of criminals foisted thus upon unwilling colonies, it is known that during the period 1717-75 there were sent from one English jail alone (the Old Bailey) more than 10,000 convicts (see Butler’s account, American Historical Review, I, 12 ff.). ? Andrews, The Colonial Period, p. 59.On Ayes Uk EQUALITY AND oo II guaranties of equality among men than pov- ___erty and misfortune.” But it is neither to the substantial economic equality of the early immigrants nor to the physical cond1- tions making for equality that the Declara- tion of Independence appeals as a sanction for its bold claim. It sought for a basis more secure. For these equalities were not of choice, but of necessity. Adaptation that 1s compelled tends to disappear with the com- pulsion. Had the demands of colonial living been less rigorous, the sheer force of habit and custom would have kept the early col- onists Europeans still. As rapidly, therefore, as adaptation to American conditions led to mastery of them, equality born of the conditions gave way more or less consciously to the inequalities to which European con- ditions had habituated the colonists. The exceptions here prove the rule. For even such groups as the early Puritans who came as a protest against, and in order to escape, certain definite Old World inequali- ties that worked specific and observable in- justice found themselves, somewhat uneasi- ly it is true, but for the most part uncon- sciously, perpetuating in America the very12 AMERICAN EQUALITY conditions they had fled Europe to escape. If the return to conditions that they de- spised was so easy for the Puritans as their early practice of intolerance and persecu- tion indicated, more easy still must have been their perpetuation of inequalities to which they had never consciously objected. And protest against Old World conditions, even among the Puritans, was more specific than general. To the vast majority of colo- nists, Becker’s generalization fairly applies: It was discontent not dissent that drove them out. Dissatisfied with their position in the English social system, they were yet well content with the system itself; a system which they were willing enough to establish in the New World in the hope of obtaining in it a more desirable position for them- selves. And so it happened that the laborer and the farmer, the small landowner and the master of a great estate, the clergyman and the high official, were disposed to take as a matter of course the position which custom assigned them, and in that position to exercise the authority and render the obedience which was proper to it.” This progress, through the mastery of adverse conditions back to what prior cus- 1 OD. cit., p. 74.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE — 13 tom had made habitual, is a story in Ameri- can history continuous with the influence of the successive frontiers. But it begins with the beginnings in America. Everywhere the principle is the same: inequalities are estab- lished and perpetuated as rapidly as is com- patible with survival under the strenuous pioneer conditions. Due largely to natural conditions, in Virginia society was quite feudal and aristocratic from the beginning. In New England it was more democratic. But, as Merriam, says, “The Puritans did not entertain doctrinaire ideas about equal- ity of any kind. They granted equality in civil rights, Bae a not include equal- ity of political rights even among the adult males.”: Even their so-called “spiritual equality” conceded “democracy in the Fall”’ only to introduce “‘aristocracy in the Re- demption.’? They imitated God in refusing to grant religious equality to all. So far, 1n- deed, was equality from being recognized as a general statement of human relations that a constant struggle went on, culminat- ing in the Revolutionary War ele against t Merriam, American Political Theortes, p. 25. 2 See Osgood, Political Science Quarterly, V1, 210.14 AMERICAN EQUALITY the social and religious inequalities prevail- ing. Not for home rule alone was the Revolution fought, but for the democratization of American soci- ety aspwelly 2-7. - Half the bitter denunciation of corruption in England was inspired by jealous dis- like of those high-placed families in America whose ostentatious lives and condescending manners were an offense to the laborious poor, or to men of talent ambitious to rise from obscurity to influence and power. What Heaven-sent opportunity, then, was this quarrel with Britain for all those who resented the genial complacence with which fortune’s favor- ‘ ites, “with vanity enough to call themselves the bet- ter sort,’ monopolized privilege in nearly every colony,’ These inequalities that had grown up in early America were not general, far-away distinctions, but very close and concrete distinctions, as Becker goes on to show: The rigid maintenance of class distinctions, even in New England, where students in Harvard College were seated according to social rank and John Adams ‘From the penalty for fine dressing, as provided in the early Connecticut statute (supra p. 4 n.), magistrates, their families, and military officers, or “such whose quality and estate have been above the ordinary degree though now decayed,” were exempt (Weeden, op. cit., I, 288). ? Becker, op. cit., pp. 240-41.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE = 15 was fourteenth in a class of twenty-four, made it pre- sumptuous for the ordinary man to dispute the opin- ion of his betters or contest their right to leadership: to look up to his superiors and take his cue from them was regarded as the sufficient exercise of political liberty. How completely enshrined in the heart of even the democratic New Englander were the social distinctions of the old England that had gladly ridded itself of him, may be 1Qp. cit p. 166. Further light of the same sort is thrown upon the curious meaning given to equality among the Puritans by the Lancaster town records (1653). After referring to the first division of land, which had alloted the same amount to each man, the record declares: “Yet that Equallitie (which is the rule of God) may be observed, we Covenant and Agree, That in a second De- vition and so through all other Devitions of Land the mater shall be drawne as neere to equallitie according to mens estates as we are able to doe, That he which hath now more than his estate De- serveth in home Lotts and entervale Lotts shall have so much Less: and he that hath Less than his estate Deserveth shall have so much more’”’ (quoted from Turner, op. cit., p. 61). This citation indicates how seriously they took the biblical doctrine of distribution upon the basis of what men already have (Matt. 25:29). This interpretation, which they declare to be “the rule of God,” was also in keeping with Locke’s view. He counseled equality “unless the Lord and Master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another.... ” (Civil Government, Il, 4). The Puritans had found in the “estates” of men the sign needed for the application of Locke’s philosophy of equality in keeping with the will of God.16 AMERICAN EQUALITY seen obliquely reflected in the Puritan con- ception of the Deity. Religious ideas are close- ly connected with social and political ideas. “Tdeal constructions are doubtless the psy- chic precipitates of social experience.’’* God, whom the Puritans professed to love supreme- ly, was a distinguished social superior. In- deed, he was a majestic lord, imperious, pow- erful, sovereign. He was the religious coun- terpart of the head of the English aristocra- cy; he was the head of the celestial hierar- chy. The Mayflower compact was signed by “the loyal subjects of our dread Lord King James’’; and daily prayers were addressed to Mather’s God, a being “almighty, absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable will, for his own glory.” The connection here between the ideal religious order and the existing social and political order is as close, even if uncon- sciously so, as it is in the Leviathan, where Hobbes in studied devotion characterizes the sovereign power as “that mortal god, who hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof he is enabled to perform the wills of ™ Becker, op. cit., p. 83.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE = 17 them all.’ So obvious is this relationship that Riley’s invidious comparison can hardly be considered odious. ‘““The Puritan divin- ity,” says he, ‘““was too much like the Stuart dynasty to be long acceptable to Anglo- American independence. Special providence, exerted in behalf of the elect, bore too strik- ing a resemblance to his Majesty’s partiality to a favored few.’” It is not singular in the light of this conception that the same strug- gle that in Virginia sought primarily to abolish entails and slavery was directed in Massachusetts not only against the intoler- ance of the godly but also in time against the Deity as conceived. It is no mere accident, then, that those who incited and led the rebellion against King George were deists or deistically in- clined persons who had first led a quieter revolt against the Calvinistic God.s Where t Morley ed., p. 84. 2 American Philosophy, p. 26. 3The extent to which the deistic spirit had permeated the Revolutionary leaders is indicated by the fact that, when Franklin moved that prayers be held in the Constitutional Convention, he added that the convention, except for three or four persons, held prayer to be unnecessary (see note appended to Franklin’s “Mo- tion for Prayers in the Convention,” Van Doren, Franklin and Ed- wards, p. 188).18 AMERICAN EQUALITY men must as inferiors accept eternal salva- tion from a theological superior or be eter- nally damned, they must also as inferiors accept temporal amelioration from social and political superiors. De Tocqueville had observed this relation and expressed it in the observation that human equality as a condition leads easily to pantheism as a religion.t Deism as represented in America by Jefferson, Franklin, Paine, et a/., was but a halfway-house on the road to the goal that De Tocqueville correctly foresaw, even if he t Democracy in America, Vol. II, chap vii. Thinking of the same tendency, Faguet indicates that in modern France democ- racy and atheism tend to go together. The democrat finds that “God is a limit. God is a restraint” (The Cult of Incompetence, p. 208). It is well enough, moreover, to remember that those philoso- phers and theologians of our own day who find a close connection between democracy and religion do so usually by adopting a con- ception of God that in times of stricter orthodoxy would certainly ‘ have been denominated “atheistic.”’ A cautious suggestion of such a conception is found in Dean Shailer Mathews’ discussion of “Democracy” (Dictionary of Religion and Ethics, p. 128; cf. also, his discussion of ““Deism,” tdid., p. 127); a clearer avowal, but still conciliatory, is evident in Professor G. B. Smith’s Social Idealism and a Changing Theology; and a thoroughly explicit and frank presentation of such a conception of God as makes all-important the democratic process is found in Professor E. S. Ames’s The Psy- chology of Religious Experience (esp. chaps xvi and xxi), The New Orthodoxy, and “Validity of the Idea of God” (Fournal of Religion, October, 1921).EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE _ ig did not correctly name it. The aristocratic ideal that was always at least latent in the religious doctrine of the northern colonies, as well as the social aristocracy that was actual in the southern, helps to explain why the basis for the early American doctrine of equality was sought elsewhere than in Amer- ica. The American Revolution, while pri- marily a revolt against the English govern- mental irritation, was at the same time a vigorous protest, and in many cases quite deliberately so, against American inequali- ties that in kind, if not in degree, matched perfectly those of European growth. And the philosophy of equality is but a corollary of a larger idea-system that had already been found to be a useful instrument of de- struction against all sorts of inequalities and oppressions. We must turn from American conditions to European theories for a com- pleted foundation of the early American doc- trine of equality. IV At least a century before the American Revolution, the warring theories in Eng- land, and more or less on the Continent, had20 AMERICAN EQUALITY already reached the significant stage of agreement upon one important point. This point was the social contract theory of the state. Hobbes, apologist for absolute sov- ereignty, no less than Locke, philosophic voice of the English revolt, believed (1) that man as individual antedated man the citt- zen, (2) that men in their natural state were free and equal, (3) that men formed govern- ment voluntarily for purely prudential rea- sons, and (4) that the origin of government casts light upon the conditions of its main- tenance. The equality of men, upon which Hobbes and Locke fundamentally agreed, was in- tegrally and indissolubly tied up with the conception of a state of nature from which men passed into government by mutual agreement. Whether the state of nature was thought of as historical or as merely psychological,t equality. was one of its in- variable characteristics. Neither Hobbes t Pufendorf clearly indicates that these two uses of the ex- pression “state of nature” were certainly recognized, if not always consciously discriminated. He declares that the term “may prop- erly be used in either of two senses: first, as designating the residual attributes of the concept, ‘humanity,’ when abstraction is made of the qualities and conditions which are due to civilization and en-EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE 21 nor Locke, as a matter of fact, insisted upon the term in the historical sense. Without categorically renouncing the historical sense, Hobbes leaves the impression that he uses the term in its psychological meaning; whereas Locke, while nibbling again and again at the historical bait,’ never quite commits his case unreservedly to history as a sine qua non of its validity. But Hobbes and Locke are at one in insisting that pre- political men were (both free and)? equal. lightenment; and second, as designating an actual condition which has prevailed at some time among each of the various races of men, though not necessarily among all at the same time” (quoted from Dunning, History of Political Theories, Il, 319). Vacillation between these two meanings was not thought of severe consequence so long as one could quite readily appeal, with , Paine, from “antiquity to antiquity more remote,” without fear of being caught up. Then, too, the historical sense is a product of very recent times. We feel more keenly than would have the men of even Locke’s time Sir Henry Maine’s stricture: “The law of Nature confused the Past and the Present” (Ancient Law, p. 76). t It is easy to infer from Locke’s vivid phrases that he was a visualizer and found it much easier to understand himself when he saw his meaning given a “local habitation” among the American aborigines or elsewhere. The state of nature was a very vivid con- cept to him, even if he would not submit his case irrevocably to history. 2 The distinction, or the real relation, between the concepts “liberty” and “equality” has been so persistingly obscure that in29, AMERICAN EQUALITY Hobbes postulates, Nature has made men so equal in the faculties of the body and mind, as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, difference between men is not so considera- ble, as that one may claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well ashe. .... Nature hath given all to all. But this equality was far from an unmixed blessing; indeed, it became a source, if not the source, of all the natural man’s woes. Men were kept so busy asserting their rights and defending them against all comers that they had no time to enjoy either rights or possessions. The isolation of man was ac- companied by such ruthless self-assertion that the state of nature was really a state the history of their use, as in Socrates’ renowned fable of pain and pleasure, where one has appeared the other has soon followed. Not even Hobbes with his proclivity for sharp definition seeks to de- tach their meaning. Rather than make a distinction where no dif- ference was intended, I shall in this historical sketch speak of equality without trying to isolate it. It would seem, however, that the confusion of them could be unimportant only when, and be- cause, the ground for their existence is in some far-off state of na- ture that either has been or may be, but is not now. It is well to re- member that in modern theories these concepts have been sharply contrasted as enemies rather than yoked together as twins.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE = 23 J of incessant warfare in which man’s hand was against everyone and everyone’s hand against him. Through stern experience, then, liberty and equality were found to be valuable only when they were accompanied by security; and security could be obtained only by at least a partial surrender of them. “Men,” said Hobbes, “have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all.” Seeing that in the reign of unrelieved equality the life of man was “‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and that the only possible relation between men was dellum omnium contra omnes, men invoked the restraint of govern- ment to escape the constraint of their peers. The state of nature was so unendurable that sheer prudence dictated the acceptance of tyranny from one rather than endure vio- lence from all. This passage from nature to government meant to Hobbes an exchange of equality manifesting itself in violence for inequality based on consent. Not only 1s equality here bargained away for inequality; but the contract is drawn in such a fashion t Leviathan, chap. xiii.24 AMERICAN EQUALITY that it, unlike an ordinary bilateral contract, is irrevocable. The sovereign is made the beneficiary of, without being made a party to, the agreement; and so “there can happen no breach of covenant on the part of the sovereign.”* The rigor of this conception, if not softened, is at least made bearable by the terror of the only alternative, Jellum omnium contra omnes. Locke is equally emphatic with Hobbes that equality was a mark of the state of na- ture. “Men being by nature all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent.’ Locke, moreover, descends to details 1n char- acterizing this equality. Property—the po- tential basis of inequalitys—existed in the state of nature, according to him; but his ingenious restriction of it to what one can “turn to his own use and no more’’4 guaran- teed equity of possessions, since there was t [bid., chap. xviii. 2 Civil Government, II, sec. 95. 3 Even under government Locke minimized inequality in prop- erty by limiting one’s property to “whatsoever ... . he hath mixed his labour with” (tdid., sec. 27). 4 Tbid., sec. 6.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE 25 enough to go round. But he sharply dis- agrees with Hobbes as to the conditions that resulted from the existence of equality and liberty. Not war, but peace, prevailed. Locke says, The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his body, health, liberty or posses- sions." Since with Locke, prepolitical man was not presocial, the state of nature was happy enough, as far as it went. How far it went, is not certain. In Plato’s? version of the transfer, the number of desires that each could gratify, when isolated, was so limited that it were better for men to trade off some of their superabundant rights for a little genuine co-operation. Co-operation made far-reaching and effective by division of la- bor became, as Plato explains it, the way to a richer life than sheer individualism and isolation could afford. Locke does not make out a convincing explanation for the ex- t [bid., chap. il, 2 Republic, p. 369-26 AMERICAN EQUALITY change, except through darkening his orig- inally too-bright picture of the primitive state;? but, through motivation that must have been quite similar to, if not identical with, Plato’s,? prudence dictated an ex- change of some of the natural rights for civil benefits. As the need of exchange, how- ever, did not appear so dire to Locke, he did not pay so dearly as Hobbes for the boon. Though it seems certain that the existence of equality in the state of nature was one of the roots, if not the root, of the inadequacy of the natural state, Locke did not explicitly sacrifice equality in the contract. Not only did men remain equal with one another but they were also in some important sense equal with those who governed. At least citizens were looked on as peers of rulers in the power that an American would likely consider paramount, the power to interpret the con- tract that defined their relation and to rebel in case the bilateral contract were broken by rulers. The very formation of the con- tract itself indicates a certain equality to follow as well as to precede. But concrete * Op. cit., II, chaps. ix ff. 2 Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 25.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE = 27 equality of men following the governmental contract was of as little concern to Locke, who used the state of nature and equality to overthrow tyrants, as to Hobbes, who used the same state with the same emphasis upon its equality to enthrone “the mortal god.” This is a most significant fact, and it indicates the truth about the claim they made of human equality. Neither of them was interested in the social contract theory except as a weapon—a weapon of offense for Locke, of defense for Hobbes. Equality in a state of nature is a fact to them, because, and only because, such a conception is need- ed to render effective the social contract theory as a weapon. As Ritchie says, “Prin- ciples were claimed because of some real or fancied authority in the past.’ Neither Locke nor Hobbes thought of men’s being equal in any very significant present sense.’ t Natural Rights, p. 7. 2 Hobbes postulated natural equality in order to justify actu- ally existent inequality; and Locke, whose picture of natural equality is far more alluring, is more equivocal regarding actual equality. According to the latter, it is limited to those of “the same species and rank”; is contingent on the will of God; and, finally, in the case of children, seems to exist only as an ideal. (Civil Government, II, 4 ff.)28 AMERICAN EQUALITY They both approved of actual inequalities among men. And even Locke did not hesitate when building his utopia in America, the Fun- damental Constitutions for the Carolinas, to provide a hereditary nobility and feudal law consistent therewith. This doctrine of nature, then, as the fount of the contract that created government, constituted the chief, if not the only explicit, basis for a doc- trine of human equality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centurtes.* Hobbes and Locke have been emphasized because they represent the final form (forms in so far as they diverge) that the social con- tract theory reached in England.? This ac- « This statement is not meant to exclude religious motivation, which was so assumed as the limiting condition of all thought as to need no emphasis. It was “the great Legislator of the universe,” as the Massachusetts constitution phrased it, who made it possible for men peacefully to enter into such a “solemn compact with each other.” For more explicit recognition of the religious influence in America, see below (chap. iv). 2 As regards other English sources, Blackstone perhaps de- serves mention along with these two. While the Commentaries had less than ten years for their influence upon American thought before the Revolution, lawyers were many and influential among the colonists of this period; and 2,500 copies of the Commentaries are said to have been imported before the Revolution (Andrews, The Colonial Period, p. 185). Blackstone was, of course, greatlyEQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE = 29 count was the orthodox American theory of government throughout the Colonial pe- riod and until the Reévolution was safely over. Indeed it was something more than just theory to the colonists. The Mayflower compact, while the first, was only one of the many applications of the theory in the for- mation of governments on American soil.* Locke in particular is to be credited with most of the thought and some of the phrase- ology of the American Declaration of Inde- pendence.? The form which Locke gave the ‘ndebted to Locke; and he rested unequivocally upon the natural and absolute rights of men—life, liberty, property. But the great- est of these was property: “So great.... is the regard of law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it, not even for the general good of the whole community” (Com- mentaries, 1, 100). t Cf. Osgood, op. cit., VI, 201 ff. see also Lowell, Essays on Government, p. 140 ff. 2Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 6. Dunning, on this point, is certain that “The state of nature, as conceived by the Americans, was that of Locke, and had in it no suggestion of Rousseau’s ‘bon sauvage” (History of Political Theories, III, 92). Sir Henry Maine seems conspicuously alone in attributing to Rousseau a large influence in shaping the American thought that culminated in the Revolution. Contrary to his thought (4n- cient Law, chap. iv, pp. 95 ff.), Muzzey, corroborating Dunning and Ritchie, expresses the modern view of the matter in asserting30 AMERICAN EQUALITY doctrine, however, was but little more origi- nal than was the form implicit in the De- claration of Independence’; and Jefferson confessed that he did not regard it his busi- ness “to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiments which had ever been offered before.”? The essentials were com- mon European property when Locke gave them his lucid and attractive and unifying treatment. Belief in a state of nature, in a sense more or less vaguely historical, seems coeval with human reflection; and tied up with this belief as a sort of corollary has gone (with the brilliant exception of Aristotle and that “it is doubtful whether Jefferson had read a word of Rous- seau’s Contrat Social in 1776, but for a decade he had been a pro- found student of Coke and Milton, of Harrington and Locke” (Thomas Fefferson, p. 50). Not only is it improbable that Jefferson knew Rousseau, but even had he known him, it is most likely that Jefferson would have turned for inspiration and ideas to his own countryman Locke, who spoke his language and who stated the essentials of the theory used by Jefferson more clearly than did Rousseau. Sir Henry Maine’s attribution of a major influence in this matter to Rousseau can more easily be credited to his desire to discredit the American democracy than to ascertain its theoretical sources. t “There is in Locke’s theory but little that had not long been current coin in political philosophy” (Dunning, op. cit., II, 345). 2Muzzey, Thomas Fefferson, p. 145.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE 31 perhaps Plato) some notion of human equal- ity.’ Such, then, is the, let us say, spiritual background of American equality as assert- ed in 1776. The claim is not so much a the- ory as a doctrine, a doctrine one of the chief dogmas of which is the equality of men. Sir Henry Maine says: ““There cannot, I con- ceive, be any question that to the assump- t The Sophists had some such conception, as is indicated by the remark credited to Alcidamas by Aristotle, “God made all men free; nature has made none a slave” (Rhet. i. 13. 1373, b. 18). The Stoics shared and furthered this view; upon Nature they rested their cosmopolitanism; from it they drew their renowned maxim for individual guidance, “Live in harmony with Nature,” and by means of their conception of natural law, they profoundly modified the Roman ius gentium and through it European legal history (see Ritchie’s, Natural Rights, p. 35 ff.). Upon Nature, or more often upon its (theological) synonym, God, early Christianity based its doctrine of human equality, in so far as it had a doctrine of equality as distinct from the practice of equality. In the fifteenth century, political and ecclesiastical theory began to turn more definitely toward a state of nature as the point of departure. Aeneas Sylvius in Rise and Power of the Roman Em- pire (1558) blends with the fancies of Plato and Polybius the He- brew story of Eden into a primitive golden age in which men were quite free and quite equal. Susanus had already, in De Concor- dantia Catholica, provided a beginning of authority in the doctrine of consent given by man in a state of nature. Against monarchs who, strengthened by the Protestant doc- trine of divine kingship and non-resistance, were everywhere grow-32 AMERICAN EQUALITY tion of a Law Natural we owe the doctrine of the fundamental equality of human be- ings.”? Whether the language used be reli- gious, as in the Declaration of Independence —‘“created equal”—or be political, as in the Virginia Declaration of Rights—‘by nature equally free and independent’’— the appeal is alike to a final philosophic weapon forged in the white heat of successive struggles for advantages in the Old World. The Ameri- cans in their struggle for special concrete privileges appeal to whatever sanction promises to be effective: first (1765) it 1s ing oppressive, the anti-monarchic writers of the sixteenth cen- tury were influenced more and more by doctrines centering on a state of nature that was not unimbellished by visions of Seneca’s golden age, from which kings had arisen only by some sort of con- tract. This view developed in all European countries: in France it is best represented by Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (1579); in Scot- land by George Buchanan’s Sovereign Power among the Scots (1579); and in Spain even more fully by the Jesuit Juan de Mart- ana’s On Kingship and the Education of a King (1599), a book dedi- cated to Philip III of Spain. In England this same tradition through Hooker, Harrington, Milton, and in more extreme form through the English Levellers (among whom the belief in equality would have turned toward concrete distribution of land, but for Ireton and Cromwell), culminated in Locke. It remained for the eloquent Rousseau in the eighteenth century to electrify these old concepts. t Ancient Law, p. 92.EQUALITY AND INDEPENDENCE = 33 “the undoubted rights of Englishmen”; then (1774) not only “the principles of the Eng- lish constitution and the several charters or compacts” but also “the immutable law of nature”: and, all this unavailing, the final appeal (1776) is to nature herself and to “certain inalienable rights.” The motiva- tion here is as clear as in Aristotle’s celebrat- ed advice to lawyers to “‘appeal to the law of nature” when the law of the land proves in- sufficient. And Thomas Paine justifies anew the age-old practice when, in his ringing call to arms, he explicitly avows, “He who takes nature for his guide, is not easily beaten out of his argument.” It well happened for the Americans that Locke, by giving this appeal to nature such classic form in his justification of the English Revolution of 1688, but fur- nished a ready-made justification for the American Revolution of 1776. The Ameri- can colonists had thoroughly absorbed Locke and were vaguely aware of the cloud of wit- nesses that stretched backward from him. As if for a day of need, Thomas Paine and other popular writers kept the tradition fresh before the public mind. Jefferson at the ap- t Common Sense, p. 116.34 AMERICAN EQUALITY pointed hour but gave the ancient views an immortal form of challenging relevancy, and the Americans laid their honor and their lives upon the laps of the gods. And as they struggled for advantages more concrete in their eyes than general equality, they made use of the claim to natural equality as a weapon with which to redress growing wrongs. Against the dogma of the divine superiority of kings is placed the no less challenging doctrine of the natural equality of men.CHAPTER II SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF EQUALITY BACKWARD glance from the Dec- Asien of Independence has re- vealed something of the motivation of the sweeping claim of human equality contained therein. A forward glance is equally enlightening. From the Declaration of Independence to the Federal Constitu- tion is a long journey, though only thirteen years elapsed and in general the same group of leaders that dared the one lived to con- struct and adopt the other. They were the same men and yet not the same. /““The view,” as the Hindu maxim runs, “depénds upon the point of view.” , Equality as a group claim to be made good against a for- eign and opposing group is one problem; equality as a principle of reconstruction within the group, quite another. So long as men must hang together—or, as Franklin waggishly remarked, “hang separately’— 3536 AMERICAN EQUALITY it is easy enough to find an unquestioned basis for equality. But when the property and welfare of each does not so obviously coincide with that of all, then the point of view——and with it the view—has fundamen- tally altered.t Such is, in brief, the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the philosophy of which latter is rather fully proclaimed in the Federalist. As Merriam has so well put it, The Declaration of Independence represented the political theory of the American people when it had “become necessary to dissolve the political bands which had connected them with another.” The Fed- eralist represented the time when it had become necessary ‘“‘to form a more perfect union.” J This changed point of view of the two periods may well be illustrated from the philosophy of an outstanding leader in both periods. John Adams, who was second to none in his enthusiasm for democratic equal- ity during the Revolution, sicklied his en- thusiasm over with the pale cast of discrim- An alteration clearly shown by Beard, Economic Interpre- tation of the Constitution.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY Bi inating thought in later years.’ Reading into others, it would seem, his own thoughts, he declared that “mankind in general had rather be rich under a simple monarchy than poor under a democracy.”* And in the last analysis, Adams was convinced that “de- mocracy signifies nothing more nor less than a nation of people without any government at all and before any constitution is instt- tuted.”’ The motivation here is not wholly unlike that of Hobbes: equality is a mark of a pre-governmental state from which gov- ernment releases men by securing those who have advantages against those who do not have them. It is perhaps not fair too sharply to set the earlier over against the later Adams; but if there is not a genuine desire to deny, there is certainly an unmistakable tendency to qualify. He now sees clearly that “nature .... has ordained that no two objects shall be perfectly alike and no two objects perfectly equal. . . . . No two men are perfectly equal in person, property, t Works (ed. by Charles Francis Adams), especially in Vol. IV, “Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America” (pp. 238 ff.) and in Vol. VI the letters that grew out of his apology for democracy (especially pp. 41 1-26 and 445-521).38 AMERICAN EQUALITY or understanding, activity, and virtue.’ Of course, the framers of the Declaration of Independence would not have asserted absolute equality; but the significant thing is that they did not feel it necessary to say in what respects men are vot equal. Adams now feels just that need: confidence has given way to questioning. Equality there still is in his philosophy; but the tang and concreteness that appealed to Revolutionary youth have been traded off for the security that maturity prizes: it is no longer such equality as equalizes, but now such equality of rights as secures inequality of possessions. “Every being has a right to his own, as clear, as moral, as sacred as any other being has.’” And there is here no lingering equalitarian standard for determining one’s ““own’’; it is given as a datum rather than measured by any norm. The change which Adams seems fairly to t Tbid., V1, 285-86. 2 Tbid., p. 453, letter to John Taylor. 3 Adams goes so far as to say, “Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, itis more bloody than either..... There never was a de- mocracy yet that did not commit suicide.” (/did., pp. 483-4.)SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 39 represent was not so much a denial of any- thing before affirmed as it was a neglect of it. It was a new emphasis invited by a new situation. The prominent place which the doctrine of natural equality held in American political philosophy had been made even more prominent by the inspiring way in which through social compacts gov- ernment had arisen in a new land. “In that transvaluation of old values effected by the intellectual revolution of the century, it was the fortune of America to emerge as a kind of concrete example of the imagined State of Nature.”’ General equality by na- ture could, with immunity, mean something more or less concrete ina New World where land seemed unlimited and opportunity beckoned to all. But its failure to mean something concrete would be also more ob- vious and more resented. As already indi- cated, there had been observable disaftec- tion at growing inequality before the Revo- lution. Nor was it always restrained disaf- fection. Disappointed expectation had now and then turned to bitter rebellion, as in Bacon’s revolt in Virginia (1675) and in the Leisler usurpation in New York (1691). But40 AMERICAN EQUALITY the issue in these cases had been complicated by the relation of the colonies to a foreign government; and, because of this complica- tion, any assuaging assertion of equality would naturally mean first of all something against the foreign government. But with the Revolution won through the efforts of soldiers who fought and humble colonists who sacrificed to make the New World safe for such equality as the Declaration of In- dependence had asserted to be the common legacy of men, this goddess Equality might be expected to drop at least a curtsy from her lofty abode to men in the world of daily action. Shay’s rebellion in Massachusetts (1786) seems to have been motivated by some such expectation. But the answer to any such expectation as may have existed was the reaction which became articulate in the Constitution of 1789, a constitution which presumably sought the common good but sought it through checking any existing tendencies toward radical equality, whether political or economic. Not that men were then denied or were soon to be denied theoretical equality. Of course they were equal—by nature. ButSLAVERY AND EQUALITY 41 what of it? The need for declaring it had passed with the winning of the Revolution. The confession of the youthful Emerson— it is significant that the confession was made to his diary—that the maxim that “all men are created equal’ was then (1822) believed by nobody except as a convenient hypothe- sis Or as an extravagant declaration’ is, to say the least, equivocal. Even if the maxim had never been more than an hypothesis (a word of wide scope), it, in proportion to its convenience, was strong then, as it had ever been. Its undiminished vitality is shown by every situation that made opportune the reassertion of equality. Wave after wave of opinion that flowed from the uplands back to the tide-water regions, impact after impact of the West upon the East, culminat- ing at somewhat regular decade intervals in Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and finally Lin- colnian avalanches, showed the abiding strength of the notion that men were under- neath all equipage equal still, and that, while their inequalities were man-made, their underlying equality was the work of Nature and was guaranteed by God him- t Riley, American Thought, p. 158.42 AMERICAN EQUALITY self. Channing, who continued enthusiastt- cally to the end of his life (1841) to assert human equality, expressed anew the faith of America in declaring that among men the observed “diversities . . . . are as nothing in comparison with the attributes in which they agree, and it is this which constitutes their essential equality.”” Nature, thought he, had seen to it that the diversities that characterize men should not negate their fundamental equality. ‘““The natural advan- tages, which distinguish one man from an- other, are so bestowed as to counterbalance one another, and bestowed without regard to rank or condition in life. Whosoever sur- passes in one endowment is inferior in others.” Thus in words almost identical with those of Hobbes does nineteenth-century America pay court to sixteenth and seventeenth- century England in reaffirming a natural foundation for human equality. It was this persistence of the natural-rights philosophy in America that kept vital and ready for each need the doctrine of equality. It was now affirmed in political, now in metaphys- t Slavery, pp. 18-19.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 43 ical, now in theological, terminology. So long as this foundation remained secure, human equality, whether affirmed or not, was afirmable on demand. But the foun- dation itself was not forever to remain un- questionable. For along with the successive capitulations of the East to the equalitarian demands of the ever lusty, ever perturbing frontier—capitulations showing themselves in an ever enlarging electorate, in a growing accessibility of the untrained to office, and in a more liberal provision for free land and popular education—there had been growing up under protest, hut ever growing, a serious ~social dilemma that was desti 5 —theinherited idea-system from which it drew eS wits strength- : II African slavery-as a growing issue in America had the virtue of finally forcing a profound consideration of the meaning and basis of equality. In spite of all other ad- mitted inequalities—and they were many— it had been possible to maintain from Hobbes to Channing the essential equality of men, by holding either that existing in-44 AMERICAN EQUALITY equalities were inconsequential in them- selves or that in a full accounting they would neutralize each other. So thoroughgoing, however, were the inequalities involved in slavery, so flagrantly did this institution en- croach upon the most fundamental aspects of personality, that no person with the herit- age of an Anglo-Saxon could long feel that the inequalities involved in it were either inconsequential or could be so balanced off as to leave the slave equal with his master. Sooner or later the question was inevitable, “In the face of how monumental actual in- equalities could natural equality still be meaningfully afirmed?”’ As the slavery controversy progressed, it was a matter of frequent assertion and coun- ter-assertion as to whether the framers of the Declaration of Independence had meant to include Negroes in the self-evident truth ? 2 that “all men are created equal.” Be that as | it may, it is a fact that though, off the one | land, Jeéffe ain never fully ~ Feselved doubt’ _as_to-whether—the—Negro —was capable of becoming in al S intellectual peer of the white thatSLAVERY AND EQUALITY 45 though, on the other hand, Jefferson meant ~theDeclaration of Independence mo appeal to such a €d philosophy as would -hallenge action than as a statement of observable facts, nevertheless, the author of the Declaration of Independence, until the day of his death, found his conscience deeply troubled when he saw on every hand this institutionalized denial of human equal- ity. With slavery in mind, he declared: “I tremble for my country, when I reflect that God is just—that his justice can not sleep forever.” Jefferson’s attempt in the Declaration of Independence—one of his many thrusts against slavery?—to hold the English throne responsible and censurable for American slavery was thought inadvisable by his col- «He more than once expressed the fear that slavery was to be the rock on which the union would split. 2 Though it may be that political exigencies sometimes limited his actions, Jefferson’s feelings against slavery seem to have been maintained with singular consistency. In presenting an exposition of rights to the First General Congress of the Colonies at Philadel- phia, 1774, Jefferson declared that “the abolition of slavery is the greatest object of desire in these colonies.’ In 1776 he reasserted this attitude both in seeking to write its abolition into the Virginia constitution and in inserting into the draft of the Declaration of46 AMERICAN EQUALITY leagues. So, also, any explicit policy regard- ing it was found impracticable in the con- vention that framed the Federal Constitu- tion. Lnanimity-errongh—_to—fernrm tte—the. Constitutrorrand-to-get it adoped wastound possi only by SOlas jlence ie ee ees u smothered or clamorous, the institution of slavery was destined to continue, as it had already become, the more or less openly recognized challenge, not to say refutation, of the natural equality of men. Let us hastily recount the history of anti- slavery thought and then seek out its basis. Slavery was very early recognized as the foe of American aspiration. The earliest statute among the colonies for the suppression of slavery, significant even if not enforced, was Independence that expressed his own convictions a stinging cen- sure of the English throne for thrusting slaves upon colonies un- willing to become particeps criminis in the nefarious business. Again in 1784 he sought to prohibit slavery in the Western terri- tories after 1800. At various times and in various forms he de- clared his abiding faith that “‘nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free”; “the hour of emancipation is advancing in the march of time’”’; “that it may finally be expected, and its progress hastened, will be the last and fondest prayer of him who now salutes you.”SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 47 one passed in Rhode Island, 1652." The ear- liest pamphlet issued in America against slavery was perhaps one by George Keith, a devout Quaker (about 1693), in which he charged his religious denomination “that they should set their negroes at liberty, after some reasonable service.”? Another early tract against slavery was printed by Samuel Sewall, judge of Superior Court of Massachusetts, in 1700, entitled, The Selling of Foseph, a Memorial. From this time on, pamphlets too numerous to mention never ceased to appear upon slavery, being chiefly against the institution. t RI. Records, 1, 248. 2 His denomination never turned back from the direction thus early pointed out for them. Their annual query in 1743 and again in 1755 inquired whether their members were clear of importing or buying slaves. In 1758 those who disobeyed this injunction were placed under discipline, and with the coming of the Declara- tion of Independence (1776), those who continued to hold slaves over lawful age were disowned. Not only did they seek to regulate and then to abolish slavery among themselves but at Philadelphia in 1775 they organized the first antislavery society in America, devoted at first to the relief of free Negroes but later (1787), with Benjamin Franklin as its president and Benjamin Rush as its secretary (both of whom were signers of the Declaration of Inde- pendence), to the abolition of slavery as well. 3 Reprinted in Moore’s Notes on Slavery in Mass., p. 83.48 AMERICAN EQUALITY Following the organization by the Quak- ers at Philadelphia of their society in 1775, the New York “Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves” was organized in 1785; the Delaware society in 1788; the Maryland and Rhode Island societies in 1789; the Connecticut society in 1790;7 the Virginia society in 1791; and the New Jersey society in 1792. These eight state organiza- tions and two of the many local societies organized in the various states held their first annual convention at Philadelphia in 1794, at which through a joint memorial to Congress they had the use of vessels and men in the slave trade declared a penal offense. These societies continued to multiply until in 1827, four years before Garrison started his Liderator—an event that is pop- t A society having John Jay as its first president and Alexan- der Hamilton as his successor, and offering, in 1787, a gold medal for the best discourse against slavery to be delivered at public commencement of Columbia College. The London abolition society was organized in 1787; the Paris society in 1788. 2A society having Dr. Ezra Stiles as its first president and Judge Simeon Baldwin as its secretary. 3 Poole, Anti-Slavery Literature before 1800, p. 59.ie an SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 49 ularly supposed to mark the real beginning of agitation for abolition—there were one hundred and thirty in the United States, of which one hundred and six were in the slave- holding states. The growth of the move- ment represented by these societies was per- sistent, though not steady, for there wasa great reaction against the abolition move- ment upon the invention by Eli Whitney K\ of the cotton gin in 1793, and again in 1830 upon the Southampton insurrection and the insurrections threatening in South Carolina during the same year. Whatever the specific arguments used at various times, and here of course there was variety, the fundamental appeal common to all the abolition societies was the doctrine of human equality. The slaves who were ~ actually unequal with the whites in so many regards ought to be treated as equal in cer- tain important respects, because they actu- ally were equal by nature in other more fundamental ways. The sanctions on which they relied to sustain this appeal were indis- criminately Nature and God. The challenge which is implied in that vast difference be- tween the declaration of the Connecticut50 AMERICAN EQUALITY constitution (1818) “that all men, when they form a social compact, are equal i rights” and the declaration of the constitu- tions of Mississippi (1817) and Alabama (1819) “that all freemen, when they form a social compact, are equal in rights,’ was consistently met face to face by the ancient doctrine that men and freemen are, in all that makes them men, equal and that there- fore they ought to be treated equally. The preamble of the first antislavery society in America, the Quaker Organiza- tion at Philadelphia, sets out clearly that the two sanctions on which they relied were “the 1 ; ature id “the _ob- ligations a Christianity.” Their field they Secon to be the world, but an unmistakable ministry they owed “in a more particular manner to such of their fellow-creatures as are entitled to freedom by the laws and con- stitutions of any of the United States, and who, notwithstanding, are detained in bond- age by fraud or violence. From a full con- viction of the truth and obligation of these principles,” they set out to make the natural rights of men effective.* Even more explicit- t Needle, Memoir, p. 30 (quoted from Poole, op. cit., pp. 42 ff.).SLAVERY AND EQUALITY Si ly does the Maryland society fall back upon the doctrine enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. The preamble declares: The common Father of mankind created all men free and equal. =< -™- The ‘human race, however varied in color or intellects, are all justly entitled to liberty; and it is the duty and the interest of nations and individuals . . . . to remove this dishonor of the Christian character from amongst them. In the same-vein; but with iiore-sardon=—— ic_reference to the inconsistency between Ametican-theory and practice; 1s2pamphilet published in 1783, “By a Farmer in Lon- don,” but widely circulated in America. The full title was 4 Serious Address to the Rulers of America, on the Inconsistency of their Conduct respecting Slavery; forming a contrast between the encroachments of Eng- land on American liberty, and American tn- justice in Tolerating Slavery. This unknown writer gets a grim satisfaction out of array- ing in opposite columns “the speeches and resolutions of the members of Congress in behalf of their own liberty, with their con- duct in continuing the slavery of others.’* There was not needed, of course, a for- « Quoted from Poole, op. cit., p. 8 n. oe52 AMERICAN EQUALITY eign critic to bring home the sting of this inconsistency. Jefferson was not by any means the only American who was pain- fully aware of this discrepancy. It is note- worthy that the early abolition of slavery in Massachusetts was not brought about either by executive proclamation or by stat- ute, but apparently* by a general declara- tion of equality. At any rate, the testimony of Chief Justice Shaw upon the point so in- dicates. He says, How, or by what act particularly, slavery was abolished in Massachusetts, whether by the adoption of the opinion in Somerset’s case as a declaration and modification of the common law, or by the De- claration of Independence, or by the constitution of 1780,? it is not now very easy to determine: it is rather a matter of curiosity than utility, it being agreed on all hands that, if not abolished before, it was by the declaration of rights.$ «Dr. Belknap thought that the general-equality clause was inserted into the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 for the ex- press purpose—generally understood so by the people—of freeing the Negroes on a general principle (Tucker, Dissertation on Slavery, p. 203). But there is dissent from this view of the matter (Poole, op. cit., p. § n.). 2 That is, by the general-equality clause in it. 3 Poole, op. cit., pp. 55 ff.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 53 Massachusetts was not alone in reading very concrete meaning out of such a general ex- pression of equality as is contained in the Declaration of Independence. The similar declaration of the New Hampshire consti- tution that “all men are created equally free and independent” was construed to mean that all persons dorn after 1784—the date of the adoption of the constitution— were equally free and independent. A sim1- lar declaration, however, in the constitution of Virginia proved but a phrase of glittering ornament without legal meaning. This same natural rights and religious motif is emphasized by the proceedings of the first national convention of the anti- slavery societies, held at Philadelphia in 1794. Two documents of great interest emerged from this first meeting. The one has already been referred to as a petition to Congress to stop the slave trade. The other was an address ““To the citizens of the Unit- ed States,” written by Dr. Benjamin Rush, and adopted by the convention. The reli- gious sanction is most heavily emphasized here. The address declares,54 AMERICAN EQUALITY Domestic slavery is repugnant to the principles of Christianity. ....- It is rebellion against the authority of a common Father. It is a practical de- nial of the extent and efficacy of the death of a com- mon Saviour. It is an usurpation of the prerogative of the Great Sovereign of the universe, who has solemnly claimed an exclusive property in the souls of men. The address closed with a portentous view of the punishment that God might send— yea, in the form of Indian raids, etc., was already sending—upon a perverse genera- tion.’ But if this appeal addressed to the public at large naturally emphasized the religious sanction—becoming a sort of call to na- tional repentance—appeals presented to Congress just as naturally emphasized the natural-rights sanction. This 1s clearly seen in memorials presented to the House of Representatives, December 8, 1791, from societies in six states. The memorial from Pennsylvania, for example, declares: “We wish not to trespass on your time by referring to the different declarations made by Con- gress, on the unalienable right of all men to t Poole, op. cit., 62-63 n.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 55 equal liberty; neither would we attempt in this place to point out the inconsistency of extending freedom /o a part only of the hu- man race.’* The memorialists from Virginia not only believed “that slavery is... . an odious degradation but an outrageous vio- lation of one of the most essential rights of human nature,” but they also “lament that a practice so inconsistent with true policy and the unalienable rights of men, would subsist in an enlightened age and among a people professing that all mankind are by nature equally entitled to freedom.” As the abolition movement under the leadership of Garrison gathered national strength and became genuinely formidable, it carried with it every shade of opinion from the most erratic philosophy of the an- archistic ““come-outers”’ to the more practi- cal program of Lincoln. Amid a bewildering variety of opinions, the one point of agree- ment, for the later as for the earlier aboli- tionists, was a belief in the fundamental t Drawn up and signed by Benjamin Franklin, president of the society. This was his last public act. (dnnals of Congress, I, 1239.) 2 Tbid., 1, 1239.56 AMERICAN EQUALITY (natural or religious) equality of men.’ Lincoln limited the equality doctrine in —certain-ways’ but remained steacfast-tn, the belief that this is “‘a nation dedicated to the __proposition-that-al-mer-are created equal.” Garrison mixed with his philosophy the ex- travagant enthusiasm of an irresistible evan- gelism, but his unshakable foundation was a human equality founded on nature and spon- sored by God himself. Dr. Wayland, the scholarly president of Brown University, whose Elements of Moral Science (1835) en- joyed some popularity, appeals to Jefferson's general-equality clause in the Declaration of Independence as a fit summary of his philo- sophic case against slavery.? But it remained for Channing, who used with equal facility the philosophic and the religious emphasis, to drive home the arguments that sounded familiar and dear to American ears. Man has rights by nature. The disposition of some to deride abstract rights, as if all rights were «Merriam, American Political Theories, p. 226. “The point of union was the belief that all men are created equal, and are en- dowed with certain natural rights which must everywhere be re- spected.” 2 Fuller and Wayland on Slavery, pp. 33-34-SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 57 uncertain, mutable, and conceded by society, shows a lamentable ignorance of human nature... .. These are gifts of the Creator, not grants of society. In the order of things they precede society, lie at its foundation, constitute man’s capacity for it, and are the great objects of social institutions. The con- sciousness of rights is not a creation of human art, a conventional sentiment, but essential to and in- separable from the human soul.? The equality of nature makes slavery a wrong.? This persistence with which all varieties of reformers rested the case against slavery on natural rights, with especial emphasis upon equality, made it, as Paine had in another connection earlier remarked, very difficult for them to be beaten out of their argument. Itt Of this stubborn fact the defenders of slavery became increasingly aware. Though they ended by doing so, the proponents cer- tainly did not begin by denying the natural equality of men. The hold of the doctrine, even in the first half of the nineteenth cen- tury in America, was too strong for that. They felt with Channing that slavery ‘‘in- * OD. cit., p. 31. 2 [bid., p. 19.58 AMERICAN EQUALITY volves the gravest questions about human nature and society,” but the issue had to become desperate indeed before they sought to answer these questions by a sweeping de- nial of this most fundamental tenet of Amer- ican traditions. However it may have been chronologically, the logical steps by which the South passed from uncomplaining ac- ceptance to belligerent rejection of the equalitarian sentiment of the Declaration of Independence are writ large on the pages of such a compilation as Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments. The process of this transformation is worth reconstructing. By common consent slavery was regarded in Colonial America as an evil, for the most part an unnecessary evil, chargeable to the mother-country. Even the colonies that later became slave-defending states had gone on record as desiring the slave trade stopped. That this view of the colonists was t Edited by E. N. Elliott, president of Planters’ College in Mississippi. Every angle of the South’s case is presented by vari- ous gifted and representative men who sympathized with the slavery cause. The compilation was published in 1860, but the essays themselves, representing various stages of the controversy, reveal not only the slavery case on the eve of the Civil War, but the process through which the case had been formulated.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 59 not made a part of the Declaration of Inde- pendence itself, as Jefferson wished, was due, not to any doubt as to its correctness, but to more extraneous counsels of expediency. So long as this view prevailed—and it certainly outlived the Colonial period—the only ques- tion was when and how to abolish slavery so as to produce the minimum harm to all concerned. But so difficult did this practical question prove that its settlement was post- poned until the question began to change to the more gravid one of whether and why. With the gradual isolation of slavery to southern sections—a process due mainly, if not altogether, to economic laws rather than to moral considerations—a certain sec- tional difference of opinion grew up—those regions where slavery had not proved eco- nomically profitable retaining the view that the institution was an unnecessary evil; those regions where slavery was proving more and more profitable gradually ap- proaching the view that it was a necessary evil. This conclusion was facilitated by the fact that the Negroes had become so nu- merous that deportation after long and gen-, erous discussion had generally been decided60 AMERICAN EQUALITY impossible, state payment for them at pre- vailing prices inexpedient if not economi- cally out of the question, and emancipation without full reimbursement to owners an open infringement of constitutionally guar- anteed property rights. So far the doctrine of fundamental equal- ity has not been questioned. The slave has rights," even inalienable rights;? and as re- cards the one right whose importance com- pletely overshadows all others—‘“the right to serve God according to one’s own con- science’ —there is actual and blessed equal- ity: “the poorest slave on earth possesses this right—this inherent and inalienable right; and he possesses it as completely as the proudest monarch on his throne.” The master “demands no spiritual service of him, he exacts no divine honors.”4 And one « Cotton is King, p. vil. 2 [bid., p. 287. 3 [bid., p. 329. 4 [bid., p. 314. With this panegyric of Bledsoe’s, it is instruc- tive to contrast Cartwright’s remark that ‘a discreet white man or woman should always be present to regulate their religious meetings” (idid., p. 728) and the rule of the Negro church to which Cotton Mather’s slave belonged, a rule which declared, “Our com- ing to the Meeting shall never be without the Leave of such as have Power over us” (Weeden, Economic History of New England, (Il. tip).SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 61 “might point out other respects in which men are essentially equal, or have equal rights,’ 1f he were writing ‘“‘a treatise on the philosophy of politics.”* It is not, then, that the fact of equality was being denied, but rather that, in order not to “deny the great differences that exist among men”— as some whose zeal outran their knowledge were doing—some discrimination were need- ed:? the period of assertion without defini- tion has passed into the period of defini- tion with varying degrees of assertion. All admitted that some limitation of in- dividual rights was necessary and just: a felon might justly be deprived of his liberty and a murderer of his life. The question was: “On what principle was the limitation to be based?” The question thus raised set- tled, rights and benefits could be distribut- ed justly, whether the distribution was al- ways equal or not. Montesquieu was quot- ed to show that “though real equality be the very soul of a democracy,” yet even “equality in a democracy may be suppressed for the good of the state.’ ‘“The Good of * Cotton is King, p. 331. ? Thid., p. 331. 3 [bid., p. 335.62 AMERICAN EQUALITY the Stute’—that is the touchstone of jus- tice. “It is the duty, and consequently, the right, of society to make such laws as the general good demands.’ Take that fundamental principle seri- ously, maintain it consistently, and there need be no further difficulty about rights. “A]l individual rights are subordinate to this inherent, universal, and inalienable right” (and duty) of society to make the general good supreme.’ The most sacred right that anyone—slave or free—can have is the right to do his duty, and the duty of all alike is ‘‘to promote the general welfare.’ Even Channing in his argument against slavery—as Professor Bledsoe with pleasure points out—had declared that the slave, “like every citizen... .- #5 subject to the community, and the community has a right and is bound to continue all such restraints as its own safety and the well-being of the slave demands.’ “Now this,” as the writer continues, “is all we ask in regard to the question of equal rights. All we ask is, that each and every individual may be in such wise and so far restrained as the public good t [bid., p. 288. a [bid., p. 228. 3 [bid., p. 328.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 63 demands and no further.’ Thus, as Bledsoe is at pains to remark, “it may be clearly shown that the doctrine of inalienable rights, if properly handled, will not touch the in- stitution of slavery.’ Since, then, the good of all is paramount to the welfare of any, it only remained to indicate how slavery served the common good. This was shown by the fact that slave labor was the indispensable means to the production of sufficient cotton (not to mention tobacco) to supply the minimum needs of mankind.’ Corroboration for this argument was found in the fact that antt- slave states and even abolitionists them- selves continued to receive cotton and to use cotton products.4 Surely they would not be t [bid., p. 328. 2 [bid., p. 286. 3 No other means had been “demonstrated,” so the argument ran; and the failure of England’s attempt to produce cotton in India with free labor made it most logical to conclude that slave labor was indispensable. The only question, then, that remained was thought to be whether the slaves should labor in the South to the benefit of America or whether they should labor in Africa to the benefit of England, who controlled most of Africa and would fast be compelled to reduce natives to slaves for the production of cotton, once slavery were abolished in the South (Cotton is King, especially chap. xi). 4 Ibid., pp. 213, 214.64 AMERICAN EQUALITY guilty of such an inconsistency were cotton not indispensable to a good life! Verily, Cotton had become king, and slaves were his gracious subjects, serving mankind as they did his bidding! So inevitably does rationalization work to provide compensations that the concep- tion of a ‘necessary evil” bears within it the seeds of its own destruction: the conviction that slavery was necessary worked gradually to dissipate the conviction that.1t-was evil. Cotton alone would have justified slavery on the greatest-happiness principle; but there were many other compensations. Pro- fessor Dew gave slavery credit for having produced among the whites of the slave- holding states as nearly a “perfect spirit of equality . . . . as can be expected or even desired in this world.” And that was, thought he, no small tribute, for “it is this spirit of equality which is both the generator and preserver of the genuine spirit of liber- ty.” Governor Hammond of South Caro- lina, in the same sentence in which he “repu- diates, as ridiculously. absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of t Tbid., pp. 261-62.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 65 Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are created equal,’”’ “endorses without reserve the much-abused sentiment of Governor M’ Duf- fice, that slavery is the cornerstone of our republican edifices.”’? These ringing tributes from eminent men prepared the way for Chancellor Harper’s cautious but unequivo- cal statement that, though slavery “‘‘was forced on us by necessity, and further fast- ened upon us by the superior authority of themother counthy .. = 4) letot ones neither deprecate nor resent the gift.’” When to the many mitigations of slavery among a cultured people were added these weighty compensations, the end not only justified the means but seemed in a good way to sanctify it as well. While logic could be satisfied with less, sentiment? demanded t Tbid., p. 109. 2 Tbid., p. 570. 3 The tremendous appeal of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made it neces- sary for the South to fight sentiment with sentiment. A survey of the literature of the time shows that it rose to the demand. “Be- sides the numerous controversial pamphlets and articles in periodi- cals there were no fewer than fourteen pro-slavery novels and one long poem published in the three years [1852-54] following the ap- pearance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Jeanette Reid Tandy, South Atlantic Quarterly, XX1, 41-50).66 AMERICAN EQUALITY that, while promoting the general welfare, even slaves should not have to sacrifice their own individual good. Though some in this matter emphasized “a little good sense and practical sagacity” rather than “abstrac- tions alone,” still if slavery were to be sanc- tified, sentiment must needs be satisfied. This satisfaction came about through the discovery that “slavery is for the good of the slave.” . So certain did the apologists for slavery feel regarding that proposition, that Pro- fessor Bledsoe is not unrepresentative in de- claring that “if, on the whole, the institution of slavery be a curse to the ae we say let be abolished.’ ’x For “‘no fact is plainer,” ought he, “than that the blacks have been elevated and improved by their servi- tude in this country. We cannot possibly conceive, indeed, how Divine Providence could have placed them in a better school of correction.”? Servitude, as the South thought, had taught thrift to the thriftless; kindliness to the brutal; industry to the lazy; morals to the immoral. “Slavery was as beneficial to the slave as to civilization t [bid., p. 297. 2 Thid., p. 416. aSLAVERY AND EQUALITY 67 in general. It supported him in childhood and old age, it protected him from poverty, it saved him from himself.” Ignorance with Jall its train of vices was subject to constant ‘remedy. That the whole moral level of the Negroes was raised by their being kept in servitude, Christy sought to show by a sta- tistical computation of the comparative criminality of the free Negroes in America with the slaves. The advantage was greatly in favor of the latter. While these so-called “‘temporal benefits” were wholly in favor of slavery as a civiliz- ing agency, they were as nothing compared to the spiritual advantages the slave en- joyed by being in America. As eternal sal- vation was superior to temporal ameliora- tion, so did the Christianization of the Negro put in the shade all other concern regarding him. And it was in this most important matter that slavery scored highest. Mis- sionaries, sent at much expense to Africa, labored long and hard merely to overcome the hostile milieu of an alien atmosphere. In America, the slave just naturally grew up to be a Christian. Christy’s study of the — a me t Tbid., p. 39.68 AMERICAN EQUALITY statistical compilations of the churches themselves revealed “that the number of slaves brought into the Christian Church, as a consequence of the introduction of the African race into the United States, exceeds all the converts made, throughout the hea- then world, by the whole missionary force employed by Protestant Christendom.’ It appeared, thus, cheaper and far more effec- tive to bring the African to the missionaries rather than to send the missionaries to him, and all the more so because while having his soul saved for heaven, he was both becoming civilized through his social contact and edu- cated through his work and also was doing a good part by the world in supplying to- bacco and cotton. While this many-sided benefit was not urged as an apology for bringing more Africans to America, it was exploited for all its worth in defending slav- ery as an example of “the mode in which Divine Providence is working for the salva- tion of the African race.”” Thus did the South come to its desired goal. The intrinsic difficulties of dealing with this inherited institution became insur- t Ibid., p. 166. 2 Ibid., p. 166.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 69 mountable when seen in the seductive color- ing of economic advantage. Economic ad- vantage begot cultural compensations. Cul- tural compensations conjured up humani- tarian mitigations. Logical justification fol- lowed. And a certain spiritual sanctification crowned the whole. Slavery had through the metamorphosis of a century changed from an unnecessary evil into a positive good. IV This conclusion, that slavery was a posi- tive_goed, ‘though-warranted by the prem- ises of the later proslavery arguments, was with reluctance explicitly drawn. Inherited political philosophy furnished for thought a limiting condition not easily overcome. But under the provocation furnished by the bat- tle cry of the later abolitionists, that slavery was malum in se and that consequently slave-holders were criminals, Calhoun, the fiery statesman of the South, nrehing in where more cautious students Bretecen not to tread, countered with the doctrine that the South’s “peculiar institution” was donum in Se. It has appeared that the conclusion that70 AMERICAN EQUALITY slavery is good rather than evil could be reached—and was in many cases reached— without denying that all men are in some fundamental ways actually equal. True, careful discrimination was necessary to in- sure the proper qualifications, as Professor Bledsoe indicated;? but, as Christy and Cart- wright both showed,’ no one supposed that Jefferson or any other of the Revolutionary fathers meant the doctrine to be taken with- out any qualification. Nevertheless, there were disadvantages to resting the defense of slavery on this basis. Even though, on the foundation of a carefully defined natural equality, slavery might be proved a positive good, could it thus be proved a permanent good? Subjection of children is good—but only while they remain children. If slavery was as effective in civilizing and Christianiz- ing the Negroes as the arguments implied, then, as regards the blacks, its ministry would eventually abolish its mission: the slave would outgrow the logic of slavery. Reacting perhaps as much to the relentless way in which the abolitionists pressed home this perturbing fact as to the observed inferi- 1 Cotton is King, pp. 319 ff. 2 Ibid., pp. 43, 984.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 71 orities of slaves, Calhoun cut the Gordian knot by denying that men are naturally equal—a denial that among other things meant that Negroes could not grow into equality with their masters. Still accepting nature as a norm, he opposed to the doctrine of natural equality the dogma of natural inequality. This radical departure of Calhoun’s was given official recognition in the formation of the constitution for the Southern Con- federacy. Alexander H. Stephens, vice-pres- ident of the Confederacy, in a notable speech delivered at Savannah, Georgia, shortly after the adoption of the new constitution, sets out fearlessly and without reservation the southern position: Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated African slavery as “the rock upon which the old Union would Splitwmelle was) right) =e The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading states- men at the time of the formation of the old Constitu- tion were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. .... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. ‘Moore (ed.), The Rebellion Record, 1 D, 44-49.72 AMERICAN EQUALITY / They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the “storm came and the wind blew, it fell.” Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cor- nerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordi- nation to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. Thus, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral “truth. sae They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal. .... The negro by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. . . . It is, indeed, in conformity with the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordi- nances or to question them. . . . . For His own pur- poses He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made “‘one star to differ from another in glory.” . .. . This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘‘is become the chief stone of the cor- ver is ner’ in our new edifice. Nature had served Anglo-Saxons from Locke to Calhoun’s day as an instrument of offense; but Nature is no respecter of per- sons or causes. The South’s need, like thatSLAVERY AND EQUALITY 73 of Hobbes, was for a weapon of defense. Calhoun, who argued the question at most length, appealed first to the obvious facts about him: no two persons seem to be equal- ly endowed. There are on every hand, not only diversities, but gross inequalities be- tween the talents as between the possessions of men. And no mitigations of this observed inequality could be found by appealing to earlier time. The most obvious form of this appeal to the past had been that, while men are not now equal, they were born equal. To this Calhoun replied that “men are not born. Infants are born. They grow to be men.’ And infants are no more equal—except in helplessness—than are men. “Nothing can be more unfounded and false,” declared Cal- houn, than “the prevalent opinion that all men are born free and equal.’ So obvious is the falsity of the belief, so demonstrable * Works, 1, 57. Cf. the disillusioned view of John Adams: “I have seen, in the Hospital of Foundlings . . . . at Paris, fifty babes in one room ;—all under four days old; all in cradles alike; all nursed and attended alike; all dressed alike; all equally neat. I went from one end to the other of the whole row, and attentively observed all their countenances. And I never saw a greater vari- ety, or more striking inequalities, in the streets of Paris or Lon- don.” (Works, VI, 452.) abide kT74 AMERICAN EQUALITY by an appeal to facts that are everywhere and to all men easily accessible, that it could never have been held either that men are equal or that they are born equal had it not rested upon a theory the disproof of which could not so easily be established. Calhoun states his case very clearly. This belief that men are born equal, he declares, rests upon the assumption of a fact, which is con- trary to universal observation, in whatever light it may be regarded. It 1s, indeed, difficult to explain how an opinion so destitute of all sound reason ever could have been so extensively entertained, unless we regard it as being confounded with another, which has some semblance of truth;—but which, when properly understood, is not less false and dan- gerous. I refer to the assertion, that all men are equal in the state of nature.’ Having reduced the claim of equality from men to babes and from babes to a hy- pothetical state of nature, Calhoun proceeds unsparingly to expose the insufficiency of this traditional view. There had never been, thought Calhoun, sufficient proof given or sought of the actual existence of any such state of nature. He did not see that the x bid: 5-8 9-SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 75 same motivation for his rejection of the view had formerly guaranteed its acceptance, in each case operating alike to strengthen the scanty proof and to weaken the observable disproof. It was foregone that when as strong a motivation for denial should arise as there had been historically for affirma- tion, then either bolstering cases would be found to support the denial, or, that proving impossible, the burden of proof would be pressed where it logically belonged, on those who affirmed. And now that Calhoun had the motivation, he pressed upon the pro- ponents of the accepted philosophy of equal- ity both their lack of positive proof and his own negative arguments. He first drove home the fact, in itself destructive of confi- dence, that “such a state is purely hypotheti- cal.”* But not only so: such a state of nature not only never did exist but never could have existed. There are two reasons why it could not have existed—the one, racial; the other, individual. Such a hypothesis is not compatible “‘with the preservation and per- petuation of the race.” With its long in- fancy of complete helplessness, the human t Ibid., 1, 60.76 AMERICAN EQUALITY child must, in order to survive, be born into a group. And this very fact—as necessary at the earliest hypothetical time as now— from the nature of the case, it must be re- membered, meant inequality of the most significant kind, an inequality of master and subject. But this racial argument was also buttressed by an appeal to individual psy- chology. Calhoun perceived that man is not wholly selfish, as the eighteenth century sup- posed. The state of nature, from which men through a social compact emerged into gov- ernment, followed logically from the egois- tic conception of human nature. Seeing that natural equality was but a part of the larger natural law philosophy inherited from the eighteenth century and earlier, Calhoun chal- lenged the whole traditional idea-system. He declared that, so far from being solitary and selfish by nature, Man is so constituted, as to be a social being. His inclinations and wants, physical and moral, irre- sistibly impel him to associate with his kind; and he has, accordingly, never been found, in any age or country, in any state other than the social. In no other, indeed, could he exist; and in no other,—were it possible for him to exist,—could he attain to a fullSLAVERY AND EQUALITY = development of his moral and intellectual faculties, or raise himself, in the scale of being, much above the brute creation. Thus does man’s very nature combine with his helplessness to make the social state both necessary and natural. Such a condi- tion of independence as the acc epted hy- pothesis pee ne was utterly foreign, then, to the social instincts of men. It was, Cher es fore, thought Calhoun, A great misnomer to call it the state of nature. In- stead of being the natural state of man, it is, of all conceivable states, the most opposed to his nature— most repugnant to his feelings, and most incompati- ble with his wants. His natural state is, the social and political—the one for which his Creator made him, and the only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race. As then, there never was such a state as the, so-called, state of nature, and never can be, it follows, that men, instead of being born in it, are born in the social and political state, and of course, instead of being born free and equal, are born subject, not only to parental authority, but to the laws and institutions of the country where born, and under whose protection they draw their first breath. As completely, then, as a little observation dispels the absurd notion that men are t [bid., 1, 1-2. 2 Ibid., 1, 59.78 AMERICAN EQUALITY equal, a little honest reflection dispels the more absurd hypothesis that men in some remote antiquity actually emerged from some presocial state in which they were equal. Nor did one reach a better end by taking the theological route. Men were not any more created equal than they were born equal. To fortify his position on this point, Calhoun argued that God did not create all races of men from one stock, but that there had been a plurality of origins and that the Negro belonged to one of the primordial vari- eties of men.t But that hypothesis aside, the surest way to find out how men were created was to ascertain how men actually compared. The Negro had from time 1m- memorial found his place as hewer of wood and drawer of water? for more favored races, even as Scripture had foretold. The verdict of God as to the equality of the Negro could best be read in the history of mankind; and as regarded the natural place of the Negro, t See Riley, op. cit., p. 182. Dr. Cartwright, the ethnologist, while disclaiming disagreement with St. Paul, nevertheless held that “‘the species of the genus homo are nota unity, but a plurality, each essentially different.” The Negro is the lowest of all the species (Cotton is King, pp. 797 ff.). 2 Tbid., p. 731.SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 79 the verdict was thought to be unmistakable. Dr. Cartwright had found this same verdict written in the skull of the Negro. And so, he declared that “the same ordinance which keeps the spheres in their orbits and holds the satellites in subordination ... . sub- jects the negro race to the empire of the white man’s will.”* And since God made him inferior, “subordination of the inferior race to the superior is a normal, and not a forced condition.”’ Such, then, was the case for slavery as regarded observation, science, and logic. As regarded argumentum ad _ vericundiam—a species that perhaps carried more weight then than now—Calhoun and his colleagues seem to have felt no lack. It is true that they could not appeal quite so proudly as their opponents to the American fathers or to the great names in English tradition—Harring- ton, Milton, Locke, Hobbes, Blackstone—but they held undisputed possession of one the magic of whose name outconjured the influ- ence of scores of lesser men. With complete confidence they could turn to Aristotle; for his defense of slavery was frank, profound, 1 [bid., p. 721.80 AMERICAN EQUALITY and ever fresh. Calhoun regarded Aristotle with reverence and used the authority of his ereat name.’ Nor did the defenders of slav- ery feel it a disadvantage when appeal was made to the Bible, the greatest source book of the timé Both-sides;-of-course;-elaimed— its authority. And while each side, by judi- cious selection of texts, made out a case as satisfactory to itself as it was unconvincing to the other, nevertheless the Bible came to be appealed to with greater confidence, an unbiased reader is likely to feel, by the proslavery speakers and writers. The aboli- tionists, in appealing to the Bible, were at the disadvantage of having to depend more upon its general teaching and tendencies; a roundabout method that had weight with certain forward-looking people but a method that could not easily be reduced to syllogism or adapted to victory in polemics. Partly, no doubt, because of this disadvantage, they tended at times to interpet the Bible very freely; at times to ignore it; and at still other times, in a pinch, to contradict it alto- gether. This compromised the case of aboli- t Calhoun, Correspondence, p. 469 (letter to A. D. Wallace, 1840).SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 81 tion in many devout minds, and was of course made capital of by southern writers." Apologists for slavery, on the other hand, had the most explicit injunctions and prece- dents. The Old Testament ‘“‘Friend of God” was himself a slave-owner. Slavery was authorized among the Jews. Jesus and his apostles after him had found slavery in their day, had recognized its existence, and had given rules for its regulation. They had never unequivocably spoken against the in- stitution. St. Paul had returned Onesimus, a fugitive slave, to his master, and had, in his pastoral letters, uniformly enjoined upon Christian slaves obedience to masters as a religious duty. An institution that had had a place among God’s chosen people from the beginning to the close of their sacred history,. that had always been recognized, never condemned, and frequently regulated by those who were accepted as divine spokes- men—such an institution, southern writers felt, had nothing to fear from any hermeneu- tics accepted in their day. With the Bible * Cotton is King, pp. 337 ff. ?So available and so effective was the biblical argument that hardly a defender of slavery failed to try his hand at it. The best defense, perhaps, is to be found in the letters of the Rev. Richard82 AMERICAN EQUALITY and Aristotle on their side—a combination that had once been long invincible—they felt secure so far as arguments from author- ity were concerned. With slavery securely established upon the foundation of natural inequality, Cal- houn proceeds, as a crowning attempt, to justify the ways of God (and Nature) to man with a philosophy of progress that somewhat belies his previous (ante p. 76) exposition of the social nature of man. He seeks to show that by a frank acceptance of natural inequality one not only lays an im- pregnable foundation for progress but also prepares, as it were, a background adapted to set off at its true worth the jewel of liber- ty. But Calhoun is here his own best com- mentator. Liberty and equality are united to a certain ex- tent.... but.... to make equality of condt- tion essential to liberty, would be to destroy both liberty and progress. The reason is, that inequality of condition, while it is a necessary consequence of liberty, is, at the same time, indispensable to prog- ress. In order to understand why this is so, it is Fuller (Fuller and Wayland on Slavery) and in Dr. Stringfellow’s article in Cotton is King (pp. 461 ff.).SLAVERY AND EQUALITY 83 necessary to bear in mind that the main spring to progress is the desire of individuals to better their condition, and that the strongest impulse which can be given to it is, to leave the individuals free to exert themselves in the manner they may deem best for that purpose. .... Now, as individuals differ greatly from each other . . . . the necessary effect of leaving all free to exert themselves to better their condition, must be a corresponding inequality be- tween those who may possess these qualities and ad- vantages in a high degree, and those who may be deficient in them. The only means by which this result can be prevented are, either to impose such restrictions on the exertions of those who may pos- sess them in a high degree, as will place them on a level with those who do not; or to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions. But to impose restrictions on them would be destructive of liberty,—while, to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions, would be to destroy the desire of bettering their condition. It is, indeed, this inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks, in the march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press for- ward into their files. This gives to progress its great- est impulse.* Calhoun’s refutatron—of _the—doetrine—of natural equality and the whole philosophy ‘Works, 1, 55-57.84 AMERICAN EQUALITY with which it was inextricably connected was of the—utmost-signifeance. The fact that he dedicated his analysis to the defense of an institution that was shortly to be vio- lently overthrown has obscured the tremen- dous force of the arguments with which he justified his denial of natural equality. It was his peculiar lot while losing his cause to win his case. That following the Civil War no American political philosopher of note has defended the theory of human nature and society that he attacked is an unques- tioned tribute to Calhoun and those for whom he spoke. It indicates perhaps not so much that the weight of his arguments was creatly influential in turning the current of American thinking, as that his was the voice through which a winning, but hitherto inarticulate, philosophy’ found its initial expression on this continent. 1 A philosophy formulated in Germany as “Idealism,” popu- larized in America by Emerson in literary form, and introduced to America in its political form as the organic theory of the state by Francis Lieber and many other German immigrants and American scholars returning from study in Germany.CHAR DER tit WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND THE AMERICAN DOCTRINE OF EQUALITY S slavery proved to be the first great institutional test of the equality doc- trine in America,so the second crucial challenge of equalitarianism was found in the inherited status of women.' The relationship between the movements looking toward the emancipation of the slaves and the enfran- chisement of women in America is chrono- logically as well as logically close. It was, be it remembered,’ the exclusion from membership in the First International Conference for the t This study of the bases of equality for women emphasizes primarily, though not exclusively, the arguments used by women during the earlier part of their struggle. This distribution of labor is adopted partly because it is thought that all the arguments available were given by the women early in their struggle and that the last half-century was a matter of political strategy and com- mon patience and partly because the philosophy of equality dis- cussed in following chapters applies to women as well as to men. 2 From what is known of the conferences that went on among the women excluded as delegates, it is not too much to say that “the movement for woman’s suffrage, both in England and Amer- 8586 AMERICAN EQUALITY Abolition of Slavery, held in London, 1840, of the American women who went as dele- gates and wives of delegates that precipi- tated in America the woman-suffrage move- ment as such? and led directly to the calling eight years later of the first congress among civilized peoples exclusively to consider civic ica, may be dated from this World’s Anti-Slavery Convention” (see History of Woman Suffrage, p. 62). As this history will be frequently referred to in succeeding pages, we may note here that it was published in 1881 (New York: Fowler & Wells), was edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, was meant to be as much a collection of materials while witnesses and participants were still living as an authoritative history of the movement up to that time, and was expected to furnish the data from which in the future there might be written “‘a more complete history of ‘the most momen- tous reform that has yet been launched on the world—the first organized protest against the injustice which has brooded over the character and destiny of one-half the human race’” (Preface, p. 8). The spirit of the book is in no sense impartial. It was meant to help the future of the movement by recording its past. It represents the movement at what the authors thought its best. But there is no good reason why its wealth of material may not be taken to repre- sent accurate data for the problem here assayed, 1.e., to discover the bases upon which the appeal for feminine equality rested, dur- ing the early stages while it was highly conscious of aim but little conscious of basic intellectual implications. Of course the question of women’s rights in society and govern- ment had been raised in America by various women under many circumstances, from the early day of Abigail Smith Adams, who wrote her husband, John Quincy Adams, during the Continental Congress (1776) these explicit, if perhaps bantering, words: “I long to hear you have declared an independency, and, by the way,WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 87 amelioration for the feminine half of the hu- man race.* This effort at amelioration took the form of a demand for equality. The history of the movement initiated by this demand, stirring as it is, concerns us here only as the means through which we may discover the theoretical bases upon which the claim for equality rested. The fact that equal rights in America came in successive waves makes it possible for us in discussing this last movement to recapitulate the motives of the earlier demands as well as to make explicit any new insights that time may have revealed. Under all the circumstances it would have been strange if the struggle that in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and at- tention are not paid to the ladies, we are detérmined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation” (quoted here from the History of Woman Suffrage, p. 32). t At Seneca Falls, New York, by the same women who had been discriminated against at London and a few others whom they had been able meantime to recruit. The declaration issued at this convention was signed by sixty-eight women, with thirty-two men “present in favor of the movement.” (For the complete list of names, see History of Woman Suffragz:, p. 810.)88 AMERICAN EQUALITY women were destined to carry on for three- quarters of a century had not sought as its theoretical basis the same foundations upon which so recently had been predicated the similar claims that freemen made for them- selves in seeking from foreign domination the insignia of freedom and that freemen were then making for slaves who had neither the freedom nor its political insignia. Not only would psychological considerations make this inevitable but utilitarian consid- erations would make it desirable; for what arguments are better calculated to wrest concessions from a man than the very argu- ments he has used in winning privileges for himself? Not to allow the same rights to an- other that one claims for himself, if reason can show the conditions to be the same, strains what has often been conceived as the rational constitution of man.” It remained for the women to make out the same case for their freedom that the men had made for their own. t This would violate what Henry Sidgwick, the English phi- losopher, has described as a basic axiom of ethics, the maxim of benevolence-—“that each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own, except in so far as he judges it to be less, when impartially viewed, or less certainly knowable or attainable by him” (The Methods of Ethics [6th ed]., p- 382).WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 8g The two most dramatic documents of the earliest American struggle for freedom and equality became not merely logically, but literally as well, the warp, therefore, into which was woven by women the woof of their aspiration. The Seneca_Falls conven- tion, after much searching for effective means of presenting their cause, adopted the form of the Declaration of Independence and drew up for themselves with only such modifica- tion as the situation made necessary its counterpart— “A Declaration of Senti- ments.’* At a later stage of the woman movement, the other greatest classic of Revolutionary times, Tom Paine’s Common Sense; became also the model upon which both a gifted male defender? and perhaps a more gifted woman advocate? built ringing appeals for feminine equality. * Both because this historic document deserves to be better known and because reference to certain sections of it are to be made in later pages, its text in full is made accessible in AppendixA. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Common Sense about Women (1881), hereafter referred to as “Higginson, Com- mon Sense.” 3Mary Putnam-Jacobi, M.D., “Common Sense” Applied to Woman Suffrage (1894), hereafter referred to simply as “Jacobi, Common Sense.”go AMERICAN EQUALITY It is difficult fairly to assess the signifi- cance attached by the women to the theo- ries that, lying ready-made, they found it ex- pedient to use for their practical purposes. We do not need to assess them at this time but merely should remember for the sake of a larger clarity that concepts are rarely exploited for their full logical content and that this fact is illustrated by what we have already learned of the use our fathers made of these same sanctions in their earlier struggles." Advancing, however, as they had with their age, the women of the nineteenth century had perhaps even clearer recogni- tion of the instrumental character of con- cepts when used for apologetics. Upon this fact we shall comment in detail at the proper place, but for the moment let us see to what extent the philosophy of equality used in the woman’s suffrage movement merely recapitulated the equalitarian philosophy of the earlier period. We have already re- marked that the two great conceptual sanc- tions for American needs were, in a word, God and Nature.? Let us in this order note t See above, pp. 60 ff. 2 See above, pp. I, 32, 53 ff.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 1 the use made by women and their supporters of these sanctions. J Since our mothers were not only the heirs of a heavily ingrained religious attitude to- ward life but, what is more, were in the great majority of cases explicitly religious them- selves, it is foregone that they would put heavy emphasis upon the notion of “equal- ity before God” in their quest for whatever equality they sought for themselves on earth. William Lloyd Garrison once in a public discussion put clearly the faith of them all when he declared: ““We know that man and woman are equal in the sight of God.’’* Over and over was this appeal to heaven made in successive conventions by the most religious and even by those who themselves were more heterodox, for the sake of the orthodox. The fact of equal- ity before God was clear enough to all of them, but how to prove the fact was a problem constantly discussed. The Bible itself could very easily be used against the * History of Woman Suffrage, p. 382.92 AMERICAN EQUALITY women and was constantly and effectively so used." While theoretically God was sexless, in practical imagination, he was a male. At least, and certainly what was of supreme practical moment, his major earthly emis- saries had always in the Hebrew-Christian tradition been males; and males too who t Certainly the women were in a far more delicate plight when they went to the Bible than were the abolitionists, and the plight of the abolitionists in this regard was bad enough. (See ante, pp. 80-82.) A delicate woman opponent, who also incidentally defended slavery, writing in 1850 gives typical expression to the majority opinion of women themselves at the time. “How many eloquent theses have been written,” exclaims she, “and how much logic wasted, to prove the equality of the sexes! It seems to us, that the writers and speakers on this subject would have done well to com- mence by defining their terms. What is meant by equality as here used? Is it intended to convey the idea that the soul of woman is as precious to the Father of Spirits as that of man; that woman has an equal interest with man in all those great events which have marked the dealings of God with His intelligent creation on our earth, from the hour in which Adam, awaking from a deep sleep, found beside him the companion of his sinless and happy life, to the present moment, when the sin-stricken and sorrowing soul of man, echoing the divine conviction that it is not good for him to be alone, still seeks in woman his ‘help-meet’ in the labors, the trials, the sufferings of mortality?” Facing the case put thus at its best in the affirmative, the author proceeds to answer negatively the case put at its worst. “And yet the unqualified assertion of equality between the sexes,WOMAN'S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 93 were uniformly outspoken in their low esti- mates of women.’ And so when women, who were theologically blamable for all human woes, came to the generally admitted organ of divine revelation, the Bible, to find some comfort for their aspiration, they found more nearly the opposite. That women who had would be contradicted alike by sacred and profane history. There is a political inequality, ordained in Paradise, when God said to the woman, ‘He shall rule over thee,’ and which has existed, in every tribe, and nation, and people of earth’s countless multitudes. Let those who would destroy this inequality pause ere they attempt to abrogate a law which emanated from the All-perfect Mind. And let not woman murmur at the seeming lowliness of her lot. There is a dignity which wears no outward badge, an elevation recognised by no earthly homage. This wise, and for her most happy equal- ity, secludes woman from the arena of political contention, with its strifes and rivalries, its mean jealousies and meaner preten- sions, in the quiet home where truth may show herself unveiled, and peace may dwell unmolested... .. All the influences of that lot to which God assigned her, are calculated to nurture in her that meek and lowly spirit with which he delights to dwell” (Maria J. McIntosh, Woman in America: Her Work and Her Reward [1850], pp. 21-24). *Of course women, hard-pressed by apostles and bishops, made the most out of such Old Testament figures as Deborah and New Testament characters as Mary. (See e.g., the diverting ser- mon upon the subject “God’s Women,” preached by Anna H. Shaw before the National Council of Women of the United States, 1891, and published in their Transactions for that year, pp. 242- 49.)94 AMERICAN EQUALITY always been easily institutionalized by reli- gious agencies for religious ends should thus find no succor for their greatest needs in their historic place of refuge left many of them hostile to their own freedom; some friendly but with a feeling of guilt; others inclined to make the most of every scriptural loophole through ingenious interpretation; and a few tough-minded women, eschewing all queasy interpretation, determined to be free once for all from this traditional obstacle to freedom. But let us now in order note representative reactions. In the background of one’s mind hover in anticipation of the self-conscious suffrage movement the figures of Anne Hutchinson, rebelling vaguely inside the religious fold against she knew not fully what; of Ann Lee, who in the year of the Declaration of Inde- pendence was imprisoned in Poughkeepsie hardly more for her opposition to war than for her opposition to marriage and other orthodox virtues; and of Frances Wright who, coming over from Scotland in 1820, when she was only twenty-two years of age, boldly declared of all religion that it “‘is a deception, it is not useless only, it is mis-WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 95 chievous; it is mischievous by its false moral- ity; 1t is mischievous by its hypocrisy; by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its promises; and last, though not least, by its waste of public time and public money.’ Nor could it be forgotten at the very in- ception of the organized movement that it was on religious grounds by religious digni- taries that American women, already ac- corded public privileges at home, had been excluded as delegates from the international slavery conference in London, 1840, the pre- cise charge being that all public function for women was “in defiance of God’s ordi- nation’’ and against English precedent. This English precedent reacted adversely upon the American women at home. The atti- tude of the American churches grew there- after increasingly hostile. An American min- ister, the Rev. Eben Galusha, of New York, echoing the sentiment at home that seated men and women apart in church in order that “men might commend themselves to God without interruption,” declared at the London convention: “I have no objection * Johnson, Woman and the Republic (1897), p. 253.96 AMERICAN EQUALITY to woman’s being the neck to turn the head aright, but do not wish to see her assume the place of the head.’”’* The Congregational churches of Massachusetts by a pastoral letter were directed to defend themselves against heresy by closing their doors to the ‘nnovators. The Methodists, who earlier had allowed women preachers, now stopped them and hurled at the new societies such epithets as “no-government, no-sabbath, no- church, no-bible, no-marriage, women’s rights societies.”? Nor was this hostility otherwise than typical of other evangelical churches. The Quakers alone of religious bodies remained consistently tolerant of public service on the part of women,’ though t History of Woman Suffrage, p. 56. The women who were destined to be pioneers in the suffrage movement in America were evidently more favorably impressed by George Bradburn, a dele- gate from Massachusetts, who in exasperation declared: “Prove to me, gentlemen, that your Bible sanctions the slavery of woman —the complete subjugation of one-half the race to the other— and I should feel that the best work I could do for humanity would be to make a grand bonfire of every Bible in the Universe’’ (ibid., p. 62 n.). 2 Jacobi, op. cit., pp. 6-8. 3The abolition movement itself made effective gestures for some two years to inhibit women’s public function, but they were soon found too useful as public speakers to make it practicable to keep them at work exclusively upon the underground railroads.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 97 the Swedenborgians were also commended by Margaret Fuller for their tolerance.’ It is little wonder, therefore, that, with all this fresh in mind, when women came to draw up the list of grievances that would justify their declaration of independence, they hurled as the twelfth count in their in- dictment against man this charge: “He al- lows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the minis- try, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.’? And in the eighth resolution adopted at the same time, it is declared “that woman has too long rested satisfied in the circumscribed limits which corrupt customs and a perverted application of the Scriptures have marked out for her, and that it is time she should move in the en- larged sphere which her great Creator has assigned her.’ This initial attempt to get back of the t Women in the Nineteenth Century, p. 122. 2 Appendix A. 3 Partly because of their historic interest and partly because they were the patterns for hundreds of other resolutions used as propaganda, this first set is made accessible in Appendix B.98 AMERICAN EQUALITY churches in order to find equality more se- curely in God was but promissory of con- tinued efforts in the same direction supple- mented by protective resolutions against the Bible as well as against the churches as its interpreters. The Fifth National Con- vention in interest of the suffrage cause (1860), after a lengthy discussion of biblical objection in which it was declared that “con- sulting the Bible for opinions as to woman’s rights, is of little importance to the majority of this Convention,” unanimously adopted the following resolutions: That while remembering and gladly acknowl- edging the exceptional cases which exist to the con- trary, we feel it a duty to declare in regard to the sacred cause which has brought us together, that the most determined opposition it encounters is from the clergy generally, whose teachings of the Bible are in- tensely inimical to the equality of woman with man. That whatever any book may teach, the rights of no human being are dependent upon or modified thereby, but are equal, absolute, essential, inalienable in the person of every member of the human family, without regard to sex, race, or clime.* t History of Woman Suffrage, p. 383. To see how continuous and uniform this hostility, compare the even severer Resolutions adopted in 1878 against religious authorities (History of Woman Suffrage, p. 787).WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY = gg The same grievance is voiced in an appeal to the women of New York (1860) signed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lydia Mott, Ernestine Rose, Martha C. Wright, and Susan B. Anthony. They declare, The religion of our day teaches that, in the most sacred relations of the race, the woman must ever be subject to the man; that in the husband centers all power and learning; that the difference in position be- tween the husband and wife is as vast as that between Christ and the Church; and woman struggles to hold the noble impulses of her nature in abeyance to opinions uttered by a Jewish teacher, which, alas! the mass believe to be the will of God." Nor can there be much wonder in the light of what happened to these pioneer women at the hands of churches and divines that twenty years later the official historians of the woman’s cause should feel constrained to say: The Church, too, took alarm, knowing that with the freedom and education acquired in becoming a component part of the Government, woman would not only outgrow the power of the priesthood and religious superstitution but would also invade the pulpit, interpret the Bible anew from her own stand- t Johnson, op. cit., p. 254.100 AMERICAN EQUALITY point, and claim an equal voice in all ecclesiastical councils. With fierce warnings and denunciations from the pulpit, and false interpretations of Scrip- ture, women have been intimidated and misled, and their religious feelings have been played upon for their more complete subjugation. While the general principles of the Bible are in favor of the most en- larged freedom and equality of the race, isolated texts have been used to block the wheels of progress in all periods; thus bigots have defended capital pun- ishment, intemperance, slavery, polygamy, and the subjection of woman. The creeds of all nations make obedience to man the cornerstone of her religious character. Fortunately, however, more liberal minds are now giving us higher and purer expositions of the Scriptures.* This quest of a theological foundation t History of Woman Suffrage, pp. 16-17. Compare with this an outburst of Stephen S. Foster during a skirmish with an ortho- dox member at the Fourth National Convention at Cleveland, 1853: “Now, tell me, in God’s name, what we are to hope from the Church, when she leaves a million and a half of women liable to be brought upon the auction-block to-day? If the Bible is against woman’s equality, what are you to do with it? One of two things: either you must sit down and fold your hands, or you must discard the divine authority of the Bible . . . . either the Bible is against the Church and clergy, or else they have misinterpreted it for two hundred years, yes, for six thousand years. You must then either discard the Bible or the priesthood, or give up Woman’s Rights”’ (Ibid., pp. 141-42).WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY tor upon which to build woman’s rights, made necessary by the orthodoxy of women them- selves as well as of the men from whom priv- ileges had to be wrested, was, as can now be seen, a difficult one. The women could not avoid the religious ground, and they could not adequately meet the objections that were hurled at once when the battle ground was accepted. Hard-pressed, they finally re- sorted, as was predicted in the passage quot- ed above, to a thoroughgoing reinterpreta- tion of the Bible from the woman’s point of view. The so-called “Suffrage Woman’s Bible,”’ ingenious in its exegesis, appeared toward the end of the nineteenth century. But the fact that it was discontinued after the commentary had been carried only through the Pentateuch may be taken as the final indication that women at last found themselves able to do what many of them would gladly have done from the beginning —fight their cause on other than religious ground. Whether men and women are equal before God matters not if they can become equal on earth without God; and the end of the nineteenth century saw substantial hope of this, not merely because of the inroads102 AMERICAN EQUALITY that a more scientifically critical treatment of sacred literature was making upon reli- gious fundamentalism but also because new utilities were appearing whereby woman’s participation in all phases of life might be justified by its fruits rather than by prece- dents. But before we turn to a direct considera- tion of these more empirical justifications of woman’s claim to equality, we must, to complete the story, note the use made in her historic struggle of the other traditional sanction—Nature. The beautiful ambiguity, not to say beneficent vagueness, of this con- cept makes it very serviceable. Nature and God have always been close enough together so that an apotheosis of nature could pass the religious mind in an emergency of faith without suspicion, functioning fruitfully as an acceptable substitute symbol and yet permitting dissent and stimulating growth on the part of those who had basically out- erown anthropomorphism but not authori- tarianism. We shall see how Nature for a time served the mothers as it had the fathers once upon a time for ‘a foundation, until, ceasing to be needed, it built a bridge fromWOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 103 theological authoritarianism to scientific utilitarianism and thus ushered the woman’s movement respectably into the twentieth century. II God’s extremity becomes Nature’s oppor- tunity. “There is,” as Havelock Ellis in connection with women’s rights declares, “but one tribunal whose sentence is final and without appeal. Only Nature can pro- nounce the legitimacy of social modifica- tions.” In the spirit of using as effectively as possible whatever instruments of social control are available, the Seneca Falls dec- laration based itself squarely upon “the laws of Nature,”* and from them deduced by means of self-evident truths “natural equality” and the “inalienable rights” of womankind.? And in introducing the resolu- tions adopted upon the occasion, they took their stand upon “the great precept of Na- ture—man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness.’ Appealing then di- t Appendix A, par. 1. 2 Appendix A, par. 2. 3 See Appendix B, par. I. Adapting the statement of the cate- chism regarding man’s chief end,a clever woman declared woman's chief end had been “‘to glorify man and to help him to enjoy him- self for a little while.”104 AMERICAN EQUALITY rectly to Blackstone’s famous defense of nature, they resolved themselves as far as might be into freedom. And what in these initial documents 1s formally presented is found to be exploited in one place or another by every book in de- fense of woman’s rights. The women be- lieved in the doctrine of natural rights—be- lieved in it just as men had believed in it in 1776. They believed in natural rights for precisely the same reason the men had be- lieved in natural rights—they needed such a belief in their business. Higginson in 1881 puts very clearly and frankly the function of such a doctrine: The same service rendered by axioms in geometry is supplied, in regard to government, by the simple principles of the Declaration of Independence. Right or wrong, they are taken for granted. Inasmuch as all the legislation of the country is supposed to be based in them,—they stating the theory of our gov- ernment, while the Constitution itself only puts into organic shape the application,—we must all begin with them. It is a great convenience, and saves great trouble in all reforms. To the Abolitionists, for in- stance, what an inestimable labor-saving machine was the Declaration of Independence. .... WeWOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 105 cannot always be going back, like a Hindoo history, to the foundations of the world. Some things may be taken for granted. The author then proceeds to apply this logic directly to substantiate the claim to rights that women were making.’ In an address to the women of Ohio, 1850, the suffragists declared: Rights are coeval with the human race, of uni- versal heritage, and inalienable; that every human * Higginson, op. cit., pp. 278-79. 7 Women were willing to come into their own by this simple device of subsumption, if so it might be. The authors of the His- tory of Woman Suffrage say, “above all other causes of the ‘Woman Suffrage Movement,’ was the Anti-Slavery struggle in this coun- try” (p. 52). When women set out to ameliorate the slaves by us- ing the sanctions men had earlier used for themselves and found that the fact that they were women kept them from helping any- body else, they then must vindicate themselves before they could assist anybody else. And they turned the conceptual weapons which they meant to use on behalf of the Negro in favor of them- selves. Subsumption was supplemented in many cases by a skilful use of an a fortiori principle based upon a recognized social invidi- ousness—if the Negroes, how much more the women? “The Atti- tude of the Church today is more hostile and insulting to American womanhood than it ever was to the black man, by just so much as women are nearer the equals of priests and bishops than were the unlettered slaves” (sbid., p. 342). It is little wonder that this in- vidiousness was keenly felt, since awakening to their own condi- tion in the struggle for the Negro’s rights, they were then made to wait for more than a half-century after his freedom for their own.106 AMERICAN EQUALITY being, no matter of what color, sex, condition, or clime, possesses those rights upon perfect equality with all others. The monarch on the throne, and the beggar at his feet, have the same. Man has no more, woman no less." In speech after speech, in memorial after memorial, the changes are rung upon the De- claration of Independence with all its argu- ments and implications. So far women but recapitulated what is too well known to jus- tify further emphasis. If they may be said to have made any original use at all of Nature conceived as a norm—and whether they did or not, these further observations are justified on their own merit—it was (1) in generalizing the scope of the natural and (2) in setting tests whereby the natural might itself be tested. Mrs. Ernestine L. Rose gives as the “one argument which is the argument of argu- ments’’on behalf of women, that their claims rest “on the broad ground of human rights.” “By human rights,” as she goes on to say, “we mean natural rights, and upon that eround we claim our rights, and upon that ground they have already been conceded t [bid., p. 106.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 107 by the Declarati adependence. .... Our claims are based upon at and immutable truth, the rights of all human- ity.’* In opening the Akron Convention, 1851, Frances D. Gage declared, “The rights of mankind emanate from their natural wants and emotions.”? Following this same line of thought, Theodore Parker in a ser- mon upon the public function of woman said: If woman is a human being, first, she has the Na- ture of a human being; next, she has the Right of a human being; third, she has the Duty of a human be- ing. The Nature is the capacity to possess, to use, to develop, and to enjoy every human faculty; the Right is the right to enjoy, develop, and use every human faculty; and the Duty is to make use of the Right, and make her human nature, human history. She is here to develop her human nature, enjoy her human rights, perform her human duty. ... . Fach man has the natural right to the normal development of his nature, so far as it is general- * History of Woman Suffrage, p- 376. Cf. also the first resolu- tion of the list adopted at the Fifth National Woman’s Rights Convention, Cleveland, Ohio, 1853: “That by Human Rights, we mean natural Rights, in contradistinction to conventional usages, and that because Woman is a Human being, she ¢herefore, has >> Human Rights” (idid., Appendix, p. 817). 2 [bid., p. 112.108 AMERICAN EQUALITY human, neither man nor woman, but human. Each woman has the natural right to the normal develop- ment of her nature. .... Now see what follows. Woman has the same in- dividual right to determine her aim in life and to fol- lownlti oe joothat manyhas- This sustained tendency to make the nat- ural mean not what always was but what- ever might come to be is well climaxed for the earlier woman’s movement when the authors of the History of Woman Suffrage identified the natural with the growing. Woman’s steady march onward, and her growing desire for a broader outlook, prove that she has not reached her normal condition, and that society has not yet conceded all that is necessary for its attain- ment. = 3.) < Moreover, woman’s discontent in- creases in exact proportion to her development. In- stead of a feeling of gratitude for rights accorded, the wisest are indignant at the assumption of any legal disability based on sex, and their feelings in this matter are a surer test of what her nature demands, than the feelings and prejudices of the sex claiming to be superior.? This line of reasoning developed under the stress of, and was well calculated to meet t History of Woman Suffrage, p. 277. 2 Ibid., p. 14.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 109 the sting of, attacks based upon the unnat- uralness of the suffragists’ conduct in speak- ing before the public, wearing bloomers, etc., and of their demands for more freedom of every kind for all women. ‘‘Woman’s sphere” as a shibboleth set narrow limits to her activities. To those, both men and wom- en, who with Rousseau’ and all the ancients would tie women down to the natural con- ceived as customary, these pioneers replied with their attempt to lift women up to the natural conceived as aspiration and growth. As Gail Hamilton? delicately expressed the matter, If home-life is the natural sphere of woman, noth- ing but necessity will ever drive her from it. Cer- tainly no allurements will ever draw her out. We are never allured to that for which we have no natural taste. Nothing is safer to trust in, nothing harder to force, than nature.3 * “To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young and take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console, to render our lives easy, and agreeable; these are the duties of women at all times and what they should be taught in their infancy.” 2 The name under which Mary Abigail Dodge wrote her pene- trating Woman’s Wrongs (1868). 3 Woman's Wrongs, pp. 83-85.110 AMERICAN EQUALITY And then drawing the full implication of her point, she goes on to say: “Certainly we shall never know what woman’s natural sphere is till she has an absolutely unrestrict- ed power of choice,—that is, until her nature is suffered to have free play.’’* And pro- ceeding from the same American predilec- tion for nature, Higginson eventuates with the same demand that nature be tested be- fore it be used as a test to inhibit women. He says, No wise person believes in any “reform against Nature,” or that we can get beyond the laws of na- ture. If I believed the limitations of sex to be incon- sistent with woman suffrage, for instance, I should oppose this. ... . I think that all legal or constitu- tional obstacles should be removed which debar woman from determining for herself, as freely as man determines, what the real limitations of sex are, and what the merely conventional restriction. That done, it will not be hard for man or woman to acquiesce in the natural limitations.’ Though the suffragists did not, therefore, as did Calhoun, repudiate nature? they quite OD. cit., p. 42. 2 There was great dissatisfaction, of course, over the lessened speed that came from having to use old concepts. Jacobi, as a good example of a general phenomenon, complains, 1894, at the unreal-WOMAN'S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 111 skilfully escaped the penalties that women had for so long accepted as a result of sub- mitting to static norms. Indeed, by accept- ing and redefining Nature, they managed, as did also most of them by accepting and reinterpreting Deity, quietly to let the dead past bury its dead while they focused atten- tion upon the living future, wherein lay the most real hope for justification of their cause. If God wills the welfare of his crea- tures and Nature acknowledges whatever ends well, then it is upon utility that wisdom will fix its attention. III So far we have seen that the movement for the equality of women did not do a great deal more than recapitulate under increased difficulties, and therefore with slower effec- tiveness, the bases that had been relied upon in the struggle for masculine equality from the founding of the Republic to the enfran- ity of the sanctions being used. Alluding to Comte’s famous stages, she says that “while reasoning about men is now generally sus- tained on a basis of positive thought, the reasoning about women scarcely ever emerges from the stage of theology or metaphysics” (op. cit., pp. I1I-12).112 AMERICAN EQUALITY chisement~-of-the-male slaves. The notions of equality before God and natural equality were used both because they were thrust upon the women in negative form by op- ponents and also because they represented the farthest reaches of the abstract insight of the suffragists themselves. But the wom- en never showed contentment at resting their case for equality solely upon either Nature or God; and they showed less will- ingness to emphasize these sanctions, and more ingenuity in interpreting them in the direction of freedom, as the movement pro- gressed. If, however, they were at a disad- vantage when the battle was pitched on these traditional fields—and in spite of all their ingenuity they were—they were at an advantage when it could be shifted to the plane of frank and unabashed utility. They were so nearly the equals of men in actual intimate daily practice that their predictions of future usefulness under enlarged oppor- t Therefore the relief felt by such a gifted woman as Dr. Jacobi when by this shift “innumerable solemnities, based on ‘the divinely ordained nature of things,’ ‘on the eternal justice’ of wom- an’s position now and forever, world without end, have passed to the limbo of many other solemnities which sink to rise no more’”’ (op. cit., p. 15).WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 113 tunities caught plausibility and cogency from their past and present achievements under manifold limitations. With every grant of privilege short of the suffrage, the utility of the suffrage itself became more ap- parent to women and more easily made con- clusive to men. Contrasting the cause of women when it rested largely upon the ap- peal of “general ideas” with its prospect in 1895, Dr. Jacobi says: Then the argument was sketched on thin and rarefied air; now it is embedded in solidities of accom- plished fact. Then it only appealed to those whose ears were attuned to the finer vibrations beyond the diapasons of ordinary thought; today it is enforced by the practical exigencies of everyday life. Then it only based itself on the abstract principles dear to the elect souls—today the Thought has descended from the empyrean, it has taken flesh, it has become in- carnate among the prosaic possibilities of men. It was a Thought; it has become an imminent Fact. It was a Right; it has become an Expediency.* Descending, then, with her “into the arena of practical issues and daily life,’”? let us, Surveying the movement as a whole, see 1 OP. cit., pp. 60-61. 2 Op. cit., p. 86.114 AMERICAN EQUALITY what were the utilities appealed to in order to justify the cause. The first was the general almost negative utility that always comes from doing what there is no adequate reason for not doing, if anybody wants it done. A great social dis- service is done when grievances are allowed to grow out of the application of a policy, irrespective of whether the policy is good or indifferent or bad. Here was, as Dr. Jacobi put it, “a representative system based. on the double principle that all the intelligence in. the State shall be enlisted for its welfare, and all the weakness in the State represented for its defence.” “Why,” as she proceeds to ask with devastating simplicity, “why” should not woman, being often intelligent, often weak, and always persons in the com- munity, be represented?”* While many in- terpretations had been given of the meaning of consent, in a government based on con- sent as its deepest claim to justice, no inter- pretations had been given ingenious enough to make into consent the raucous refusal to consent upon the part of many women. The only basis, therefore, upon which wom- 1 OD. ctt., p. 93:WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 115 en could be denied the political rights that men had were, as Mrs. Anna G. Spencer eloquently and sardonically stated it, “that women are not human’ beings”; or “‘that they are a kind of human being so different from men that general principles of right and wrong proved expedient as a basis of action in the development of: men do not apply to them.’ If, then, women are people and such people as other people are, the suffrage and what goes with it in the way of legal and economic privileges belong to women sheerly by math- | ematical deduction:? that which is a part of | that which is a part of something else is it- self. a part of that something else, even though “‘that which” be women and “that something else’”’. be humanity. One apolo- gist for suffrage went so far along this line of thought as to say that though she “could not see what definite benefit would accrue to woman or to the State from indiscrimi- nate female suffrage,” yet ““the exclusion of t Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sci~ encé, XX XV, Supplement, p. 11. 2**An inevitable deduction from democratic principles,” as Dr. Jacobi called it (op. ci#., p. 183).116 AMERICAN EQUALITY any one class from an equal position with another regarding affairs in which both have an equal support, is arbitrary and unnatu- ral, and all things unnatural are wrong and hurtful. On this ground female suffrage seems to me a right and wise measure, and its prohibition an absurdity.’ The minimum thing, then, to be seen even from a utilitarian point of view was that women actually were exerting great power and influence;? that they were intel- ligent; that they were concerned in all hu- man affairs. The minimum thing to be done in such a case was to acknowledge formally what was seen to be true, by granting the right to vote, however the vote might be used. Such a point of view? seems to have been quite basic to much of the argument, t Gail Hamilton, Woman’s Wrongs, pp. 93-94. 2 So great in fact that even anti-suffragists at times flattered themselves that they controlled “‘the vital principle of government itself—unseen herself, working like nature, in secret, she regu- lates its pulsations, and sends forth from its heart, in pure and tem- perate flow, the life-giving current” (Maria J. McIntosh, op. cit., p- 25). ° 3In this the women were but making use of a principle long before recognized and stated by Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics, Book V.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 117 especially toward the close of the struggle for woman suffrage. There was simply no reason against it, and it was not only unjust but socially injurious to humiliate women by withholding from them what belonged to them. But this was the minimum thing to be done and certainly the minimum thing to be said in its justification. The maximum justification rose to visions of the greatest positive utility. The major advantages foreseen to accrue from, and therefore to justify the hazard of, woman suftrage—“that equality of rights,” as Charles Sumner called it, “which is the first of rights” —may be summarized under three heads: (1) greater self-protection, (2) greater social effectiveness, and (3) more complete development of personality. We shall briefly remark on these utilities in the order mentioned. 1. Se/f-protection.—Strange as it seems to ears no farther removed than ours from the initiation of the struggle for woman’s rights, it is well within a century when women, par- ticularly married women, were practically helpless so far as the simplest legal recourse went. Submerged at marriage in the person-118 AMERICAN EQUALITY ality of her husband by the dogma of the common law; deprived of property rights, even of the free use of her own dowry; ex- cluded, as the last dregs of humiliation, from cuardianship of her own children—the mar- ried woman was put body and soul at the mercy of her husband, helpless before the whim or bestiality or prejudice of her mate. Her status was not in practice, of course, as hopeless as it would sound in the ears of one alien to our culture, with its emphasis upon charity and chivalry.* But however 1 Pride apparently prevented the women pioneers from mak- ing as much of the brutalities suffered by women as they might have made. One of the few examples I have noted of the use of elemental brutality for propaganda purposes in the various his- tories of the woman’s movement is that reported by Emily Collins of a Methodist exhorter in the state of New York “who every few weeks, gave his wife a beating with a horsewhip. He said it was necessary, in order to keep her in subjection, and because she scolded so much.” It may be added incidentally that the wife had “only six or seven children” to try her patience (History of Woman Suffrage, p. 88). “The husband of Annie Besant left her because she dared to investigate the Scriptures for herself, and was sustained by the courts in taking from her the control of her little daughter, simply because the mother thought best not to train her in a special reli- gious belief, but to allow her to wait until her reason developed, that she might decide her religious views for herself” (History of Woman Suffrage, p. 79°).WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 119 mitigated the practice might be, the wife in general had not rights, but only favors.? It was not, however, so much the protec- tion of the wife’s person as the defense of her property that led to the first state action, New York, 1848, in her behalf.? This act amended and generalized in 1860 became the first genuine legal protection that wives had in America and was used as a model by other states as the justice and utility of the protection became slowly apparent. This sanction of self-protection was well stated by Higginson in his declaration that “we gave the negroes the ballot, simply because they needed it for their own protection; and we shall by and by give it to women for the same reason.’ 2. Social effectiveness —There runs through- out the literature of the woman-suffrage t Compare the motto of The Revolution, a paper on behalf of woman’s rights, started in New York City, 1868, by Susan B. Anthony: “Principles, not policy; justice, not favor; men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.” 2 The thrifty Dutch fathers in New York State wished to pro- tect the property of their daughters who might marry into the dissipated Dutch aristocracy of the state. (See History of Woman Suffrage, pp. 63-65.) 3 OD. cit., p. 315.120 AMERICAN EQUALITY movement a strain of pity over the social waste involved in the general subjection of women. It is commendable that it was the women themselves who felt that “obedience to outside authority to which woman has everywhere been trained, had not only dwarfed her capacity, but made her a retard- ing force in civilization.’ ‘“The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and moth- er.”? The virtues called out by motherhood, real as they are, are ‘‘only the negative vir- tues that belong to apathetic classes, such as patience, endurance, self-sacrifice.”’’ The virtues of the wife are potentially positive, but themselves stunted by the inferiority of an unequal status. The weasen, weary, withered, narrow-minded wife . .. . , her interests all centering at her fire- side, forms a painful contrast in many a household to the liberal, genial, brilliant, cultured husband in the zenith of his power, who has never given one thought to the higher life, liberty and happiness of the woman by his side; believing her self-abnegation to be Nature’s law. This “‘painful contrast” grew more painful still when it was transferred from the home t [bid., p. 27. 2 [bid., pp. 22-23. 3 [bid. 4 Ibid.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 121 to the larger sphere of life in general. For as late as 1840 Harriet Martineau was able to find only seven employments open to women in the United States, viz., teaching, needle- work, keeping boarders, working in cotton mills and in bookbinderies, typesetting, and household service.? College education was not available for women until the nineteenth cen- tury was well on its way, and it was not un- til 1848 that the first woman—Elizabeth Blackwell—was admitted to a medical col- lege in the United States. The law as a pro- fession remained closed until long after this; and the ministry of evangelical? churches has lagged behind the other professions.3 tSee Hecker, 4 Short History of Women’s Rights (1910), p. 174. c 2 As liberal as the Quakers had been historically—from them of course came a great disproportion of the leaders in women’s causes—it was not until 1878 that they voted full equality to their women in managing property of the Society (History of Woman Suffrage, p. 783). 3It is easy to understand the irritation that women would feel as they surveyed the larger field of life, “ripe unto harvest,” from which they were excluded as laborers, and the resentment they would feel at every organization that they blamed for their condition. Emily Collins exclaims, in a private letter: “Would to Heaven that women could be persuaded to use the funds they ac- quire by their sewing-circles and fairs, in trying to raise their own condition above that of ‘infants, idiots, and lunatics,’ with whom122 AMERICAN EQUALITY And even where they were allowed to work they were not given pay equal to that re- ceived by a man for the same work. This led Senator Robert L. Owen, from Okla- homa, to say as late as 1910: “I shall not mock their necessity by calling them queens of the homes, and then denying them the ballot, which is necessary to enable them to receive equal pay for equal work. Equal pay for equal work is the first great reason justifying this change of governmental pol- icy-y When women, progressively conscious of their powers, surveyed the field of social relations in general, they were painfully con- scious of how much the world suffered for want of them. And it was to the great and obvious utility of freeing their powers for the humanizing of life in general, as they were admitted to have humanized the do- mestic sphere, that they made constant our statutes class them, instead of spending the money in decorat- ing their churches, or sustaining a clergy, the most of whom are striving to rivet the chains still closer that bind, not only our own sex, but the oppressed of every class and color” (History of Wom- an Suffrage, p. 92). t Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science, XXXV (1910), Supplement, p. 7.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 123 and continuous appeal in seeking complete emancipation. In a word, as it was so well put by Anna G. Spencer, Women must be given the duty and the respon- sibility as well as the protection and the power of the ballot in order that there may be established a free, recognized and obvious channel by which the value of woman’s contribution to the State may be conserved and effectively applied to social welfare.* 3. Self-development.—It was all well enough to allege as the utilities that would justify woman suffrage (1) protection of her rights within the home and (2) enlarged fields outside the home for her generous energies. But it would inevitably come home to women, however unselfish they might be, that they must first de somebody before they could give anything to others, whether in the home or in the world. Pre- occupation with growing children had taught them to safeguard and foster human development as a virtue in itself. Constant contact with men whose only, and often- times by women admitted, superiority arose from superior opportunities for develop- ment, brought home to women the great * Tbid., p. 15.124 AMERICAN EQUALITY lesson that development, like charity, should begin at home. Women were both from their nearness (almost invariably) to grow- ing children under them and (not infre- quently) to matured men over them pecu- liarly well placed to see and to emphasize that the final justifying end-product of all political and economic freedom 1s fully de- veloped personalities. Here, if anywhere, women had, and have, an opportunity to make a contribution, not wholly new to be sure but greatly needed, to democratic gov- ernment. A few citations will indicate how great the emphasis that women themselves put upon this important point as justifica- tion for the rights they claimed. The first of a series of resolutions adopted by the Thirtieth Anniversary Woman Suf- frage Convention, held in Rochester, 1878, was: ““That as the duty of every individual is self-development, the lessons of self-sacri- fice and obedience taught women by the Christian Church have been fatal, not only to her own highest interests, but through her have also dwarfed and degraded the race." Long before this, Gail Hamilton had t History of Woman Suffrage, p. 787.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 12s seen that the justifying virtues of the de- mand on the part of women for freedom were contained in the objections then raised against the movement, “‘that the exercise of that right will change, first, the womanly nature, and second, the womanly sphere.’ Finding, in kindred spirit, the virtue of woman suffrage in the very changes it would produce in women themselves, Dr. Jacobi declared: The demand to emerge into political individuality from a condition of political non-existence,—the de- mand to become recognized factors in the political life of the State, implies, and also forbodes changes in the social status of those demanding, which is of far more consequence than any of the special reasons which may be urged in support of the demand.? The same writer elsewhere remarks that: The gravest consequences of denying the right to an effective opinion is, that this denial soon atro- phies the power to form a just opinion. The greatest importance of democracy is its power to develop power in the masses upon whom it has been con- ferred. t Op. cit., pp. 75-76. 2 OD. cit., p. 3. 3 OD. cit., p. 133.126 AMERICAN EQUALITY And again she says, If the highest utility in a democratic state lies the development to the utmost of all the capacities of all its members, . . . . it is superfluous to try to show further that the enfranchisement of women would redound to the welfare of the... « states Assuming that women have differences from men other than those that lie, as an opponent of suffrage had declared, “‘in the unlikeness of her garments and in some anatomical discrepancies,’ Mrs. Anna G. Spencer goes to the very heart of the matter in her statement that: Women are not so different from men as to be- come strong in character without having the dis- cipline of moral responsibility or become broad-mind- ed and socially serviceable without the opportunity to ‘learn by doing’ the duty of a citizen. Men and women are different, but not so unlike that they can become fully developed human beings in circum- stances totally different.’ But it is to an earlier advocate of wom- an’s rights, one of the very earliest signifi- cant voices raised in this country, that we should look if we wish to find the most en- t Tbid., p. 191. 2 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sct- ence, XX XV, Supplement, p. 12.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 127 thusiastic emphasis upon spiritual develop- ment as the ripest fruit of freedom. I refer to Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century* awakened the slumber- ing fires of ambition in many an American woman’s heart. Herself a woman who had grown intellectually great under distressing handicaps, Margaret Fuller found growth intrinsically good. She quotes from the let- ter of a friend the fine saying that “‘the mis- fortune of our sex is, that young women are not regarded as the material from which old women must be made.’? In a genial mood she accepts as a name for her ideal woman a verbal abomination coined by a hos- tile critic—‘‘Glumdalclitches’—with the ex- planation that “We do not object to it, thinking it really desirable that women should grow beyond the average size which has been prescribed for them.’ Explaining t Published first in The Dia/ (Boston, July, 1843) under the title of ““The Great Lawsuit.—Man versus Men; Woman versus Women,” the essay was later published in a volume edited by her brother, Arthur B. Fuller, with an Introduction by Horace Gree- ley, and containing other papers also that related to woman. Pres- ent citations are to this volume (Boston: John P. Jewett & Com- pany, 1855). 2 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, p. 413. 3 Ibid., p. 267.128 AMERICAN EQUALITY why women had historically shown such in- terest in religion, she strikes deep at the psy- chology of the situation in her remark that “the women, shut out from the market- place, made up for it at the religious fes- tivals.” For, as she not without pathos adds, ‘““‘human beings are not so’ constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.’* And then finally, we catch her in prophetic mood to learn that in the good time coming— There is no reason why women should not dis- cover the secrets of nature are open, the revelations of the spirit waiting for whoever will seek them. When the mind is once awakened to this conscious- ness, it will not be restrained by the habits of the past, but fly to seek the seeds of a heavenly future.’ IV We have now traced briefly the progress of the woman-suffrage movement through its early crucial stages, staying close to the literature of the leaders, and with an eye ever upon the norms and sanctions relied up- on to make their claims seem reasonable. In t Tbid., p. 36. 2 Tbid., p.109.WOMAN’S RIGHTS AND EQUALITY 129 following their emphases upon thealagy and upon natural rights we have recapitulated the philosophy—ef—earlier_Ameriean- equali- tarianism. In tracing through the various values which they forces to result from, and which they used as sanctions to initiate, freedom for women, we have both recapitu- lated some past eens and anticipated in part an approach to the philosophy of equality which shortly we shall attempt the more completely to derive from the accep- tance in America of the doctrine of evolu- tion, a doctrine little referred to by Ameri- can women of last century. Their emphasi upon consequences, and among the variou consequences their especial emphasis upon growth and development, is the most for- ward-looking aspect of the philosophy of woman suffrage. If the women pioneers of the nineteenth century may be said, in the vein of traditional courtesy, to have in- tuited a new basis for equality, then the masculine philosophers may in advance be said to have reasoned it out.CHAPTER IV EQUALITARIANISM IN QUEST OF A PHILOSOPHY HE special pleading of Calhoun for slavery was paralleled by other more disinterested attacks upon the tra- ditional idea-system that had served as foundation for the American doctrine of equality. The purpose of the present study does not permit an exhaustive account of the passing of the natural-rghts philosophy. But we may conveniently recapitulate the history and decline of the conception by briefly re- viewing Lowell’s lucid essay entitled “The Theory of the Social Compact.” 1 After tracing its genesis in England (be- ginning, as Lowell thought, with Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity, 1594), 1ts 1m- portation to America, its decline and passing in England under the Georges, its flaming t Essays on Government, pp. 136-88. 130EQUALITARIANISM 131 J upin France through Rousseauand theFrench Revolution, its belated appearance in Ger- many in metaphysical form, and then its gradual decline first in Continental Europe and finally in America, Lowell permits him- self some general reflections upon the doc- trine itself. It arose, because, when with the Renaissance the distinction for the first time grew passably clear between private right and public authority, origin of govern- ment by consent appeared as the only alter- native to the divine right of kings. Consent as a foundation for government demanded some sort of technique through which it could be secured. Thus arose very naturally the social compact, standing on the nearer threshold of a state of nature in which men had been equal and free. The chief reason for the persistence of the doctrine, as indeed for its origin, Lowell finds in the service 1t rendered existing inter- ests. Whatever becomes at any time an in- dispensable means to a much desired end is guaranteed acceptance. Lowell thinks that no better example than the history of this conception can be found of Lecky’s conten- tion “‘that men are chiefly persuaded, not132 AMERICAN EQUALITY by the logical force of arguments, but by the disposition with which they view them.” Though serviceable for the time in which it flourished, the theory really contained, as Lowell proceeds to show, the seeds of its own destruction. Consent could not fruit- fully be thought of as given once for all. The only alternative to that, however, was anarchy. Moreover, as Spinoza and Leib- nitz had long before pointed out, there was an element of naive credulity in the assump- tion that a contract could be “intrinsically binding in a state of nature when other rights do not exist.” But the chief cause for the decline of the doctrine Lowell takes to be the general change from speculative to post- tive thought and especially its historical absurdity, which became evident through an evolutionary philosophy and exploration of surviving semi-barbarous races. As it ceased to function usefully, it disappeared." II But the conception of equality did not pass with the passing of its ancient basis. t Like early forms of speech, however, it persists, and often with strength little abated, in popular thought. (See Lowell, ibid., p. 171 n., and Merriam American Political Theories, p. 311.)EQUALITARIANISM 13’ v mJ It is true that Calhoun had given it up alto- gether; but not all men are as logical as Cal- houn, and few men have had such compell- ing desire to be rid of equality. Had this general philosphy been the only basis of equality, the latter would presumably have passed with the passing of the former. The fact that it did not so pass indicates that it had other sources of support. Like the hero of a once-popular ballad who, when his legs were shot away, fought still upon the stumps, the doctrine of equality lived on as though it too bore a charmed life. It had become too closely connected with the concept of democracy to pass while democratic government was spreading throughout the world. There is, indeed, good historical ground for the supposition that democracy, whatever more it may mean, must at least mean some kind of equality. Plato rated democracy as a form of government very low because, among other reasons, of its insistence upon “equal- ity between things that are equal and those that are not2+“ristotte; though more favor- ably disposed, admitted that for democratic states “equality is above all things theirwo pore ee 7 134 AMERICAN EQUALITY A” ) aim”: Montesquieu thought eqyality the - very soul of democracy De Tocqueville iden- tified_democracy with-equality; Locke cer- tainly supposed that democracy involves at least equality of natural rights; Rousseau held equality as the precondition of liberty and the primary aim of all popular gov- ernment; the American fathers shared the faith of Locke; and the French Revolution- ists wrote “equality” into their trinity of aims. Historically all intelligent critics alike have confessed democracy’s equalitarian complexion: some have called that complex- ion its virtue, others its defect. Such modern authorities as Sir Henry Maine,’ Sir James Stephen,? and in America a group fairly represented by President Nicholas Murray Butler,3 have sought to show that in the democratic household there is division and that, since liberty and equality cannot dwell together, equality must go. Along with these critics, who have been unfriendly toward democracy conceived as equality, may be listed also the brilliant French student Fagu- et. No one has set out better than he the * Popular Government. 2 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. 3 True and False Democracy.EQUALITARIANISM 135 close ee between democracy and equality, though it be but the more tellingly to eae the defects of democracy." In pic- turesque language he declares that “the peo- ple’s one desire, when once it has been stung by the democratic tarantula” is “that all men should be equal, and in consequence that all inequalities natural as well as arti- ficial should disappear.” (But there are con- temporary friends of democracy who are as on to praise as Faguet is to censure this equalitarian emphasis} Conklin de- ies a “equality is the dearest of the democratic graces’’:? Pro fessor Dodd, in a brilliant delineation of “The Struggle for Equality in the United States,” surpasses even De Tocquev ille in asserting that “‘de- gota er mocrdcy 1s equality, econom! polit ical, and even social in large measure Pa Dean Inge of St. Paul’s feels assured that “democracy, as a form of society, rests on the idea of so- cial equality’’;* and Lord Bryce has in the intervening century found some confirma- J phe . F £ . . é ny roam = Direction of Human Ex lution, p. 127. 3 International Fournal of Ethics, XXVIII, 456-84.136 AMERICAN EQUALITY J tion for De Tocqueville’s broad contention that “the love of equality is stronger than the love of liberty.”’* While not all contem- porary students of democracy are as em- phatic as are these, yet such citations indi- cate that long after the notions of natural rights and the social compact have become, as Lowell phrased it, “exploded theortes,”’ equality is still emblazoned upon the demo- cratic banner.’ III But, with natural equality confessedly refuted, what forms has the assertion of equality taken in America since the Civil War? An answer to that question will lead logically to a consideration of the newer bases of human equality. Speaking gener- ally, the doctrine of equality has undergone two closely connected transformations. The first change was from the assertion of equal- ity as a past or present fact to the declaration of it as a worthy ideal Lincoln’s well- known and clear-cut observation upon the t Modern Democracies, I, 68. 2 Merriam, op. cit., pp. 308 ff. 3 This shifted emphasis has already been alluded to in the discussion of woman’s claims to equality. (Supra. chap. iii.)EQUALITARIANISM 137 equality clause in the Declaration of Inde- pendence, while more an interpretation than an exposition, reflects clearly this changing status of the equality doctrine. Calhoun’s argument against natural equality needed for its support such a philosophy as slowly fought its way to acceptance in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century in the form of organic evolution. The newer anthropology, built upon an evolutionary foundation, brought facts to confuse those the strength of whose theories lay in an ap- peal from existing inequalities to a rosier period in a hazy past. With the researches of Spencer and others, it became increas- ingly clear that the-mrore remote the antiq- uity to which one appealed, the greater the inequality of men; the more primitive the people studied, the more complete the domi- nance of some over others and of the tyranny of custom and superstition over all. Equal- ity, like freedom, ceased to appear an origi- nal datum of human nature, and came to be an achievement of the social process, as Cal- houn had contended. From a claim of fact, equality thus, through the slow metamor- phosis of scientific discovery, came to be ac-138 AMERICAN EQUALITY cepted as an ethical ideal. Rousseau had ~ foreshadowed such a shift, in his declaration that “it is precisely because the force of cir- cumstances ténds always to destroy equal- ity, that the force of legislation ought al- ways to tend to maintain it.” But with him equality was not merely to be gained, but rather to be regained. Rousseau, of course, put the blame for this disparity between the ideal and the ac- tual upon social conventions. But with the nineteenth-century recognition of this hia- tus, Nature herself underwent a transvalua- tion of values. From being the benign giver of all good gifts and the guarantor of all those given, as the eighteenth century had tended to picture her,' Nature now became t Cf. Hardy’s To Outer Nature— “Show thee as I thought thee When I early sought thee, Omen-scouting All undoubting Love alone had wrought thee— “Wrought thee for my pleasure, Planned thee as a measure For expounding And resounding Glad things that men treasure.”EQUALITARIANISM 139 the niggard stepmother, who not only gives nothing good but wars continually against the weal of her hapless ward. It remained for Huxley, the ardent disciple of Darwin, completely to unmask Nature. From her man could expect no unmerited favor; from her he could learn nothing of moral worth. Conceived at her best, Nature wore the mien of utter neutrality— ee . some Vast Imbecility, Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, an Automaton Unconscious of our pains.” Conceived at her worst, she became a “‘mon- ster, red in tooth and claw,” destroying with- out prevision the products of her own proc- esses. “‘So careful of the type she seems, so careless of the single life.”” Man’s hope and aims, his moral interests and his plans for betterment are precisely what distinguish him most sharply from such a natural order. Ethics has nothing to do with Nature, ex- cept to superimpose, wherever possible, an alien law and a steady hand of control upon her effrontery, brutal in its indifference.140 AMERICAN EQUALITY Huxley’s picturesque way of putting the matter was not lost on American thought. This attitude found clear expression in America through Edmond Kelly.t On the one side is Nature with all her inequalities, including a most radical inequality of men; on the other side is man, the product of Nature, seeking to control her for his own ideal ends. Kelly says, Justice may, then, be described as the effort to eliminate from our social conditions the effects of the inequalities of Nature upon the happiness and ad- vancement of man, and particularly to create an artificial environment which shall serve the individu- al as well as the race, and tend to perpetuate noble types rather than those which are base.’ While this thoroughgoing antithesis be- tween man and Nature was not accepted by all who considered the problem of human inequality, nevertheless that aspect of it which necessitated making an ideal rather than a fact of the claim of equality marked one important change in the American doc- trine. As the second transformation, equality as t Government or Human Evolution, especially in Volume I. 2 Ibid, 1, 360.EOQUALITARIANISM 141 a general abstract doctrine got dissipated into specific claims more or less concrete. The evolutionist could not find equality in the past; common-sense observation had always failed to find it in the present; it must therefore exist as an ideal to be realized in the future. But if it is to be a program for achievement, it must substitute for its gen- eral far-away character a certain concrete- ness, for effective action is always specific. A fact may be as general and as broad as it is and if the chief basis for the assertion of it is merely the desire for its existence, then there is no restraint from asserting it in its most general form. With some such motivation, the traditional philosophy had with a generous sweep declared that a// men are equal, without the trouble of adding any qualifications whatsoever.’ But if one sets up a program for action where the diffi- «Cf. C. T. MacCunn, Ethics of Citizenship, “It would have been enough to make out a case for equality before the law; or for equality in vote and in eligibility to office; and perhaps for some ef- fectual abatement of inequality of social status, and of fortunes. But they did not think so. In an evil hour for their cause, they took up a position which they thought to be strong because it was so ex- haustive, and even by public declaration proclaimed ‘equality of >>? men = (p. 3).142 AMERICAN EQUALITY culties are many and hard, prudence dic- tates that, instead of making his aim so in- clusive as to discourage, if not outright to inhibit, endeavor, he make his claims mod- est enough and concrete enough to facilitate their realization. And so the persisting claim of human equality, general and factual, simmered it- self down in America during the nineteenth century to three major claims, each more or less specific: (1) all men ought to be equal be- fore the law, (2) all men ought to have equal access to the suffrage, and (3) all men ought to have equality of opportunity.t This is not to say that from the beginning in America a struggle had not been carried on for con- crete equalities; but in earlier times equality was something other and far more than spe- cific equalities: the fact that zt existed gave moral validity to the claim that they ought to exist. And so the emphasis upon natural rather than civil equality. But following the decline of the natural-rights doctrine—and the sequel shows the shift in emphasis to be * This third claim, while having a large vague connotation, came especially to stand for economic and educational aspiration. All these claims were made of women also in proportion as the woman’s rights movement forged to success.EQUALITARIANISM 143 important—there came a time when the doctrine of equality seems to have dissi- pated itself into, and practically to have been exhausted by, these specific claims for concrete privileges. This shift from fact to ideal in a relatively specific field of American interest but fore- shadowed a long overdue reinterpretation of the nature and function of ideas through- out the whole field of philosophy. The claim of general equality, as already noted, tended naturally to take a past tense: men were created equal or they were by nature equal. This retrospective tendency grew out of the age-old human predilection to regard ideas as of ontological significance. This tendency stands out with all its challenging naiveté among the earliest civilizations. The He- brews finding themselves possessed of dreams of brotherhood and idyllic bliss that were observable neither in their social life nor in their physical environment (the milk and honey of which was too allegorical to drink or eat) and yet feeling that there must exist a real counterpart to these ideas, put it in the past as a reality: hence the Garden of Eden. The Greeks, awakening to re-144 AMERICAN EQUALITY flectiveness from the reign of the mytholo- gists and finding themselves possessed of ideas also that found no satisfactory coun- terpart either in Grecian society or in Gre- cian geography, and yet never doubting that ideas have ontological meaning, supple- mented their barren present with a richer, realer past: hence the Golden Age. Plato, when Greek thought had come to maturity, was still so under the domination of this fundamental assumption of the ontological significance of ideas that, finding himself and others possessed of such charming ideals as seemed not to befit any earthly past, how- ever remote, he put them out of time alto- gether in order to make them the realest of all things and then invented a theory of knowledge by recollection to bridge the gulf between relatively real ideas and the realest of all things which the ideas meant. The future reference of ideas as constituting their meaning was, if present at all, very vague in either Greek or Hebrew consciousness. The putting of the Golden Age behind rather than before mankind, persisted all the more through the influence of Christianity, which interpreted ideas, whether good or bad, asEQUALITARIANISM 146 ~ having real ontological counterparts already eternally realized in highest heaven or in lowest hell. The nearest approach that Christianity came to reading a future sig- nificance into ideas was in the imagery of the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven: and even here it was realized in advance and given to man ready-made. Ideas have been in the history of man so unique, so magical, so comforting, that man could not believe them other than promis- sory of reality, and only with the coming of a technique of control did he begin slowly to suspect that their meaning might look forward rather than backward; that their promise was of something that mzght be in the future rather than of something that necessarily had to be in the past. This change from equality as a fact (which tended to be put in the past) to equalities of the sorts named (to be striven for in the future) pre- figures a revolutionary change 1n the Ameri- can philosophy of ideas and ideals. The two closely connected claims of equal- ity before the law and political equality indi- cate, for the most part, the negative direc- tion taken by the equalitarian impulse inee 146 AMERICAN EQUALITY America. Even if there were no theoretical justification, the practicality of law would have assuredly made its function negative. But to the practical considerations were added the weight of a laissez faire philoso- phy which held that government best which governed least. The whole Anglo-Saxon struggle for equality before the law—a time- honored aspiration transferred to America in the political habits of the colonists and brought to its final expression in the declara- tion of the Fourteenth Amendment that no state shall “deprive any person of life, lib- erty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its juris- diction the equal protection of the laws’ — has been thus but a persistent effort to equal- ize the burdens of associated life. Justice was held to demand that necessary taxa- tion, punishment for crime, and all other restraints that the law must lay shall be laid impartially. And so the extension to all of the “right to sue and be sued”’ represents “the culmination of an age-long experimen- tation with the problem of reconciling ind#t vidual freedom and public order.’ Chiefly out of the desire to establish and to maintain eS ae ee peatedEQUALITARIANISM 147 an equalization of burdens grew a demand somewhat more positive in its nature—an insistence upon the right to vote.’ The story of this persistent demand and of its steady realization constitutes the most Conspicuous chapter in the history of Ameriean democ- racy. Starting with a severely limited suf- frage, the democratic impulse has overcome iC 1] successively religious barriers, property limi- il tations, racia disqualifications, and finally in our own day sex boundaries. Equal par- ticipation in suffrage has been avidly sought 1 yy an ever enlarging number primarily be- J | IT cause it was felt to be the only effec- tive guarantee that the negative terms upon which associated life shall be sustained are not to weigh more heavily on some than on others. This instrumental nature of political equality is indicated by Bryce’s observation: > ee ee : ee ens aT Popular g overnment has been usually sought and won and valued nolL aS a YUU tililix 172 Lis Ms but Jeans of getting rid of tangible grievances or secur- Lle benefits, and when those objects have been . or ae attained, the interest in it has generally tended to de- t Godkin, Problems of Modern Democracy, p. 56.148 AMERICAN EQUALITY The motivation of this struggle for political equality is also clearly set out in Bryce’s further remark that “‘as a rule, that which the mass of any people desires 1s not to gov- ern itself, but to be well governed." In a word, the equality before the law, general- ized by the Fourteenth Amendment and made effective by the universalizing of the suffrage in the Fifteenth and the Nineteenth amendments, indicates and completes this impulsion in its more or less negative as- pects. But equality as an ideal has also devel- oped its positive form. “Equality of oppor- tunity” is the general statement of the de- mand, but its influence has been felt specifi- cally upon both the aims of legislation and upon the changing nature of the laws en- acted. This more positive emphasis was little known in early America. With a conti- nent of unappropriated but not unappreci- ated opportunities before them, the pioneers were little inclined to stress equality of op- portunity.? So long as there was easily avail- able enough for all, it was more natural that t Tbid., Il, 501. 2Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 343- a ta it een ntl et betas tee ene tiest _ saree atti cainEQUALITARIANISM 149 the maxim of conduct should be “each for himself’’; for if the government would but preserve order and not oppress, every indus- trious man could take care of himself. When, however, with fuller exploitation of natural resources, 1t became apparent that the max- im of “‘each for himself” really left many hindmost as toll for the devil, new occasions taught new duties.?) The popular cry for a freer field with fewer favors tended to devel- op the legal meaning that private interests may be of public concern:? law may some- times tell men what to do as well as what not to do. Pari passu with the lengthening of the shadow cast by such foreseen out- comes as the passing of the public domain, complete monopolization of timber above and ores below the land, and even of the exhaustion of the soil itself, the cry for equal- ity of opportunity approached unanimity as the official expression of the equalitarian impulses in American life. Ward represented the sociologists in declaring that “equality t President Eliot of Harvard University clearly sets out this change in American philosophy in his little book entitled The Coz flict of Individualism and Collectivism in a Dem flict 2 The most celebrated statement being by the Supreme Court, Munn vs. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113.~ ~~ 150 AMERICAN EQUALITY of opportunity is the only means of deter- mining the degree of merit”’;? Hart, the his- torians in listing among the living American ideals “‘equality of opportunity’’;? Conklin, the biologists in defining democracy as “a system which, ideally at least, attempts to equalize the opportunities and responsibili- ties of individuals in society’’;3 Dewey, the philosophers in judging social institutions and political measures by test of “whether the general, the public, organization and or- der are promoted in such a way as to equalize opportunity for all’’;+ Herbert Hoover, the men of affairs in finding the spirit of Ameri- can democracy in “‘its glorification of equali- ty. of opportunity for all’;5 and Woodrow Wilson, following the emphasis that Lincoln before him liked to make® and applying also his own earlier conviction that the function of the state consists in an “equalization of conditions in all branches of endeavor,’ * Sociology, chap. xii. 2 American Nation Series, XXVI, 85. 3 OD. cit., p. 101. 4 Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, p. 483. ° The World’s Work, April, 1922, pp. 585-88. ° Works (Nicolay and May), I, 179 ff. 1 The State, secs. 1273 ff.EQUALITARIANISM 151 crystallized this common thought of the nation into a political program in his first campaign for the presidency.’ Finally, Pres- ident Eliot, at the close of the century, look- ing back upon a period that had completely accepted in principle and had, it felt, largely succeeded in establishing in practice the negative aspect of the equality ideal, sum- marized the contemporary American con- ception in terms of equality of opportunity.’ That both civil and political equality has been accepted in principle and more or less achieved in practice, that equality of oppor- tunity has come to be unanimously accepted as the goal of social justice—these facts, significant in themselves, serve but to neces- sitate the question which this study seeks to answer, namely, On what basis, or bases, have these several equalitarian claims rest- ed? Since it appeared to be the breakdown of the doctrine of natural equality as a fact that necessitated these claims as moral ideals, they cannot logically assume as basis ‘ The New Freedom. Wilson’s basic plea in this remarkable collection of campaign speeches is that opportunities should be equalized by curbing the monopolies of the privileged. 2“‘Contemporary American Conception of Equality” (Phi Beta Kappa address at the University of Missouri, 1909).152 AMERICAN EQUALITY the existence of a fact whose non-existence motivated their genesis. They have asserted that justice demands that men who are actually unequal should be treated equally. On what conception of justice does such a conclusion follow? Certainly not upon the traditionally accepted notion of justice. Aristotle’s statement of the principle here involved rings as clearly now as when he made it. His canon of justice was: “If the persons be not equal, their shares will not be equal; and this is the source of disputes and accusations, when persons who are not equal receive equal shares.’ Equal remuneration for unequal labor would hardly, as a general practice, be less complainingly received by the moral sense of our day than it was by the laborers in Jesus’ parable of the vine- yard.? Why, then, should men have equality before the law; why be given equality of opportunity? IV With equality become an ideal, its basis might be expected to shift from impersonal nature to human nature, from history to t Nichomachean Ethics, v. 3:6. 2 Matthew, 20:1-16.EQUALITARIANISM 163 psychology. And speaking broadly, this is what happened. A unified basis for the in- sistence upon specific equalities will emerge from a separate consideration of the influ- ence upon American thought of three fac- tors: (1) Christian theology, (2) Kantian ethics, and (3) Utilitarian philosophy. And first it is well to correct and to com- plete the scant justice heretofore done to the influence of religion on the American doc- trine of equality. The most available justi- fication for not emphasizing more explicitly the influence of religion upon the early views is the fact that the church itself, seizing upon the conception of natural rights, poured its spiritual wine into the available philosophic bottles. Nature to the fathers was that which if called by a theological name would serve as well. Whatever consideration has been given to natural law as a basis of equal- ity was therefore also at least implicit recog- nition of the religious influence. But more explicit recognition of it is demanded by the fact that while the religious influence did work hand in hand with the then-current political and legal philosophy, the former also worked right on after the latter154 AMERICAN EQUALITY had ceased to dominate American thought. While the average eighteenth-century Eng- lishman, permitting the Puritans “‘to glorify God and enjoy him forever,” went on stolid- ly about his own business pursuits, as Pro- fessor Tufts remarks,‘ in America there was a difference. Torn from England at a time of foment and persecution and isolated in a new world of straitened environment,’ Puri- tanism suffered a kind of arrested develop- ment. But having got in on the ground floor of the American enterprise, it showed a re- markable tendency to persist. Montes- quieu’s remark that “religion in England does no harm” did not apply to America. The influence of religion in America was pro- found, and this influence lasted well into the last half of the nineteenth century. While it is obviously true that religion has been most influential in keeping alive a faith in human equality among the class that has never yet discarded the belief that men are actually t The Individual and His Relation to Society, p. 1. 2 It was this phenomenon that caused Barret Wendell to sug- gest that “New England would be better named if, in the course of generations, it had come to be called Old” (The Cambridge Modern History, VII, 725).EQUALITARIANISM 15s equal also by nature,' nevertheless by social osmosis upward, and otherwise, religious in- fluence has been strongly felt by those who have formulated American thought, especi- ally by political and legal theorists.? Now the whole weight of this influence, whether Puritan or otherwise, has been to keep alive a belief in human equality. A glance at the nature and history of Christian doctrine will make apparent some of the reasons for this. From the beginning Chris- tianity made men conscious of themselves by such large-scale contrasts as to minimize whatever difference there might be among them. The Augustinian and Calvinistic exe- geses, to which Puritanism fell heir, seemed, if anything, to heighten these colossal con- * Popular thought is still confessedly impregnated with the same political philosophy that was brought to America from Euroy th enteenth centur S p. 132n ? An influence recurrently expressing itself in, and perpetuat- : . : . itself DY, such far-reachin yr Waves OI revivalism as swept most of the colonies in the middle of the eighteenth century and many 3 Save, as noted in ch upter 111, in the case of feminine aspira- | Seamed terete avr ole-hearted anomalous discrimination against | her that so troubled and puzzled the intellectual woman of the156 AMERICAN EQUALITY trasts. The whole race of Adam 1s so de- praved when seen in juxtaposition with the blinding purity of God that there ceases to be degrees of even sin among men: “Who- ever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.”” Even those who were snatched like brands from the burning had no distinction whereof to boast, for their salvation was by grace wholly un- merited. Natural men were equally lost; the elected ones were equally saved; and even the saved, when they saw themselves by the light of heavenly holiness—as they were encouraged constantly to do—were so wholly without human merit that they too, like the lost, were but poor worms of the dust. In such a milieu, human inequalities, like the witches in Macbeth, “made them- selves thin air into which they vanished.” Indeed, the infinity of this theologically in- herited contrast darkened counsel so com- pletely that such gross inequalities as had served for the unsophisticated Anglo-Saxon to mark the choice between dishonorable life and honorable death were beneath no- tice; for in Christ not only did economic andEQUALITARIANISM 167 even sex inequalities disappear but the bond and the free were one.’ The equality thus obtained through a kind of bankruptcy of human worth had great influence, at least by setting limiting conditions for all more specific thinking. 3ut to the influence of this theological background was added more conscious and explicit emphasis looking toward equality. Close association of men fostered by religion at least once a week, its co-operative enter- prises, constituted a sort of “practice of equality” very significant, as later discus- sion will show, even if viewed quite apart from theory. Moreover, God had created all races of men from one stock; all had lost their splendid birthright in Adam; Christ had died for all;? a common lot awaited all upon earth—birth, marriage, disease, death —after death, a common judge; and through « “J 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” (Huxley, “On the Natural Inequality of Men,” in Method and Results). 2The view at least toward which religious thought increas- ingly gravitated in America as the nin ‘teenth century progressed, in spite of the early opposite direction given it by Edwards.158 AMERICAN EQUALITY eternity for the saved a common guerdon, for the lost a common doom. The funda- mentals of this theology—which was also a psychology and a cosmology in one—was driven home with a lasting emphasis in early America by Edwards. While, of course, the changes of a century made themselves felt in theology, eliminating now this crudity, now softening that sterness, yet the great influence of religion toward a doctrine of equality easily persisted into the post- natural law period. For almost, if not quite, throughout the nineteenth century, the changes in theology left singularly unmodi- fied one tenet, a tenet too that served as a cornerstone for equality—a certain static view of the soul. God himself is unchanging: “‘the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Man is made in the image of God; it is indeed the possession of a certain substantial minia- ture of God’s spirit that makes man, man— God breathed into Adam’s nostrils the breath of life, and not until then did Adam become a living soul. Though there existed some room for haziness or even for dispute as to the exact modus et tempus ofEQUALITARIANISM 159 Adam’s descendants’ receiving this spirit of God, the human soul, all were at one in holding that before it comes, man is not man; that after it leaves, man 1s but corpus. The Christian sects in Colonial times could disagree so violently on other things because they agreed so fundamentally on this. The deistic revolt in the eighteenth century left quite undisputed the commonly accepted doctrine of the soul. Paine clearly implies throughout his dge of Reason an unques- tioned acceptance of the orthodox view upon this vital point, even had he not explicitly stated his belief in God and a hope for im- mortality of his soul “beyond this life.”’ Moreover, the motivation at work is inter- estingly foisted aboveboard when in the next sentence he declares, “I believe in the equality of man.” Paine, much in the spirit of Kant, wished to abolish spurious knowl- edge in order to make way for a valid faith, as he avows upon the first page of the Age of Reason. Franklin likewise, in his 4utobiog- raphy, confesses a profound belief in the im- mortality of the soul. The Unitarian pro- test expressed itself through Channing as not merely acquiescent in but even insistent160 AMERICAN EQUALITY upon the orthodox view of the soul as fur- nished to man.t The impatient yearning of transcendentalism culminated, through Em- erson’s articulation, in an over-soul to which men were related as more or less brightly flickering under-souls. Ingersoll, who after Paine was the enfant terrible of popular reli- gious thought, certainly had not deeply ques- tioned—even granting him capable of such questioning—the currently accepted view of the soul. The small influence on American thought of materialistic eddies in Europe is indicated by the fact that no well-known American philosopher or scientist of the pe- riod expressed a thoroughgoing materialism; and common thought was even less suscepti- t Unimportant in this context, but supremely important gen- erally, was the Unitarian insistence upon the inherent goodness of man; instead of satanic parentage and consequent total depravity, it asserted the universal fatherhood of God. Moreover, Unitarian- ism believed God to be good, because it believed the soul to be a divine microcosm. ‘The soul,’ writes Channing, “is the spring of our knowledge of God... .. We must start in religion from our own souls. In these is the fountain of all divine truth. An out- ward revelation is only possible and intelligible, on the ground of conceptions and principles furnished by the soul. Here is our prim- itive teacher and light. .... The only God, whom our thoughts can rest on, and our hearts cling to, and our consciences can recog- > nize, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls,EQUALITARIANISM 161 ble to such leanings. Finally, the influence of Darwin, destined to create an impression eventually, made slow headway against such hoary and sacred views as those about the soul. During even thelast quarter of the nine- teenth century, leaders of thought in Amer- ica who did not with true religious fortitude hold out faithful unto death against evolu- tion, so diluted or compromised or compart- mentized their acceptance of it as to guar- ] i antee practical security, if not actual 1m- munity, to the soul, until the century was over.t Though amid this earthly dance of plastic circumstance all else should change, yet so long as the soul and God stood sure, a firm foundation remained fora belief in hu- man equality. And so for half a century aft- er the natural-rights philosophy had ceased to be consciously appealed to, this not unre- t A scientist graduated as Doctor of Ph phy from a repu 1 - 7 = ; L, on me } - table American university in the first d le of the twentieth cen- ; eae turv was heard to suggest to a group of upperclassmen in a secular university that, while evolution may have produced the organism of the first man, he did not become a living soul until God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life! Verily, “‘man is not logical and his intellectual history is,’”’ as Dewey says, “‘a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to w hat he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis” y - “Np = | ] p- s+ Human LVGinTeée Glia Condu /, p- a mh}162 AMERICAN EQUALITY lated religious account of the soul continued to serve as ground for the ancient belief. The combined weight of the limiting con- ditions furnished by religious faith to all American thought, as indicated above, the practice of equality fostered by the churches, and the universally accepted view of a ready-made soul—the weighty influence of all these religious factors was summarized in the universally acclaimed formula, “equality before God.”’ Here, then, is at least a partial answer to the question raised above. Men ought to be equal civilly and politically, ought to have equal opportunities, because they are equal—before God. That is, men actually are equal, could they but be seen sub specie aeternitatis, as God sees them. This notion of a furnished soul, which served so conveniently as a religious basis for equalitarian demands, was reinforced through a new approach furnished by the Kantian ethics, the influence of which on American thought grew as the doctrine of natural equality declined. When, in 1827, Francis Lieber, a German refugee of good mind and scholarly training, came to Amer- ica, he brought not only a pregnant theoryEQUALITARIANISM 163 9) of the organic as over against the contractual basis of the state but also a new account of the ethical nature of man. The German in- fluence upon American thought steadily in- creased from then on to the close of the cen- tury. Lieber’s college teaching and writing, particularly his pretentious and influential treatise entitled Political Ethics (1838), as well as his personal influence upon such other teachers of America as Theodore D. Wool- sey, president of Yale and author of Political Science, all conspired to give him a large place in the beginning of the movement which, after the Civil War, culminated in a yearly emigration of American students to German universities. From all these sources, the German idealistic philosophy, initiated by Kant and culminating in Hegel, came, by the close of the nineteenth century, to be the orthodox philosophy of America. The Kantian philosphy, though much more than this, was at heart essentially an ethical formulation. Taking his cue from the stupendous dualism of Christianity, in- dicated above, Kant comes out with that dualism still unresolved, though now clothed in the pretentious language of philosophy164 AMERICAN EQUALITY and much belabored with heavy thought. The natural world of religion became in Kant’s language the phenomenal world; the spiritual world, the noumenal, a world in which as the Idealistic movement progressed all values gradually congregated. Man shared both these worlds. His desires and interests tied him to the phenomenal. Pure reason itself moved in the world of time and space, and landed man, when sometimes it pushed impatiently at the bars of his earthly cage, in hopelessly bewildering antinomies. Only in the will as manifesting itself in prac- tical reason could man enter the noumenal world of absolute freedom. But he could so enter. And since all men had this nexus with the real world, they were, in so far, equal. Autonomy of will expressing itself in the categorical imperative, as over against the phenomenal selves manifesting their nature in counsels of prudence, was the insignia of man’s real self. The transcendental unity which Kant thus achieves no more arises out of the world of experience than does the soul of religion arise from a favorable con- catenation of somatic atoms. Instead of arising out of experience, the Kantian selfEQUALITARIANISM 166 is furnished to, and conditions, experience. Men are equal and should be treated only as ends precisely because as moral beings they tower above the phenomenal world of measurement and are consequently infinite. It is interesting to note that natural men, according to Christianity, are equal, because they are infinitely insignificant; whereas noumenal selves, according to Kant, are equal, because they, like the elect souls in Calvinism, are infinitely significant. At- tribution to men of infinity always gives formal equality, whether through a leveling down to the equality of complete moral bankruptcy or a leveling up to the equality of absolute autonomy; for what is infinite can be neither more so nor less. That the motivation of Kant’s metaphysical equality is not alien to that of Christian theology is also externally indicated both by the fact that he starts from a religious dogmatism and by the further fact that he uses his ethi- cal outcome—autonomy of wills, from which flows his equalitarian doctrine of the king- dom of ends—to reinstate the traditional religious values, God, freedom, and immor- tality. The self of the Kantian ethics is thus,166 AMERICAN EQUALITY like the soul of Christianity, a transempirical somewhat of which equality can be, ethically ought to be, and logically must be, predicated. The utilitarian ethics, which also had considerable influence upon American thought, especially through legal and politi- cal channels, served in the long run, if not directly to emphasize, at least indirectly to assume, the same basis that has, as indicat- ed above, appeared common to Christian theology and Kantian philosophy. Ben- tham’s well-known antipathy to abstractions prevented him from consciously relying upon them. There is genuine insight in his re- mark that the judgments, “Justice, Right, Reason require it, and the law of nature commands it, and so forth; all are but so many ways of intimating that a man is firmly persuaded of the truth of this or that moral proposition, though he either thinks he need not, or finds he can’t, tell why.” Taboo- ing all such obscurantism, Bentham flattered himself upon his ability to tell why. ““The general happiness principle” became the concrete touchstone to which he brought all demands for justification. It was hardly short of ridiculous, thought he, to claim thatEQUALITARIANISM 167 men are naturally equal; but that does not mean, of course, that we should not have equality as an ideal, provided only it squares with the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Bentham believed that equality could not only pass the test of utility but that it had also great positive value as one of the means to the maximum of happiness. Equality, though one means to the good, is not the chief means to be emphasized. Be- fore it come subsistence, security, and abun- dance. It is not to be insisted upon at their expense; but if, after they are assured, equal- ity can be realized, the general happiness will be thereby increased.’ Bentham meant consistently to follow his principle that nothing could be justified except by showing as its Increment an excess licht of this, what can be made of his further demand of pleasure over pain. But in the that “each count for one and nobody for more than one?” It really means not only that in his mind justice is prior to pleasure, but also that the individual brings with him to the happiness-hunt something so import- t This Bentham thought to prove by a kind of hedonistic law of diminishing returns (see Cioi/ Code, chap. iv168 AMERICAN EQUALITY ant as to be taken for granted. This some- thing is, psychologically put, a common sus- ceptibility of all men to the “Sovereign Mas- ters, Pleasure and Pain,” certain fixed desires, a ready-made interest in pleasure. The fact that Bentham felt no need for dis- tinguishing (as Mill later did) different qual- ities of pleasure indicates that what he took for granted in men was also assumed to be qualitatively equal. Men are men before Bentham begins to deal with them. He did not feel the need of indicating the method whereby selves arise, precisely because he assumed the current religious account of their genesis to be correct. In this assump- tion he seems to have been representative of utilitarianism in general. There is no occasion here to score an easy point by citing from the so-called Theolo- gical Utilitarianism Bishop Berkeley’s re- ligiously motivated remark that “no dis- tinction can be conceived between men,”’ or such similar sentiments frequent from Berkeley to Paley; such views are foregone once the background is understood. But the significant thing is that what the theological utilitarians made the center of their empha-EQUALITARIANISM 169 sis, the non-theological utilitarians took for granted, starting with the religious presup- positions about the soul or using the whole theological paraphernalia as a convenient “sanction” for the enforcement of moral de- mands, as did Bentham. Both sets of utili- tarlans were at one in insisting upon a tele- ological justification as over against an a priori one. But the more the end served, the results achieved, were emphasized as the ethical criterion, the more unconsciously the individual at the other end of the relation- ship was assumed to be furnished ready- made tO the situation. As Dewey observes, “the idea of a fixed and single end lying be- yond the diversity of human needs and acts rendered utilitarianism incapable of being an adequate representative of the modern spirit." The chief reason why this is so Dewey suggests in a later passage.” It is that fixity begets fixity: the logical counterpart of a fixed end is a ready-made self. Only here and there in the history of utilitarian- ism is there a suggestion of the possibility of the constitutive influence of the situation, Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 183.170 AMERICAN EQUALITY the concrete social process, upon the individ- ual as well as upon the end. One such sug- gestion—the most notable one—is Mill’s well-known insistence upon a qualitative distinction in pleasures, a distinction which is as significant in describing the individual judging as it is in describing the pleasure judged. But Mill himself never saw the full meaning of this suggestion. It did not lead him to call in question the assumption of a ready-made self furnished to the specific situation. So completely given (apart from the so- cial process) are the selves with which law and ethics must deal that utilitarianism dis- integrated society into a thoroughgoing at- omism. But, as in many another case, 1t was found easier to decompose than to recon- struct: the terms of the analysis left no basis for an adequate synthesis. “Sanctions’’ so external as to be suspiciously like compul- sion were invoked, but there was no final resolution for this atomism except the power and grace of God. This was frankly ad- mitted by the early utilitarians, like Berke- ley and Paley and Tucker; assumed by Bentham; and made the subject of seriousEQUALITARIANISM 171 concern by the later utilitarians, Mill, Bain, and Spencer. That the efforts of the latter group, though laudable and helpful, were not entirely successful is seen in the reversion of Sidgwick, perhaps the keenest as well as the latest of them, to the old-time theologi- cal aid for final resolution of this problem. The renewal by Sidgwick at the close of the nineteenth century of the original rap- prochement between utilitarianism and the- ology but serves to indicate that a certain common view of human nature was inher- ently fundamental to both. At bottom this common element may be reduced to the Same conception already seen to be shared by theology and the Kantian ethics, namely, the notion that the “essential attribute” of man is a soul furnished to him independent of the social process. All these systems of thought found a place, of course, for growth: Kant set the soul the task of subduing all desires to the mastery of a universalizing reasonableness; the utilitarians, the task of creating out of external compulsions internal sanctions; and Christianity, the task of add- ing the Christian virtues, of “growing in grace and knowledge.” In all of them, in-172 AMERICAN EQUALITY deed, the task of the soul was growth; but the soul was as given as was the task. The very nature of the given logically involved, and made inevitable, the nature of the task assigned it. Though there might have been differences as to just what and how much was given, for all of them alike at least the core of individuality was furnished. Locke himself had reduced the given to the mint- mum; but though the human ‘tabula was ra- sa, still the tabula was there." The fundamental place which this con- ception of a given self as the true differentia of man has found for itself in these three major movements of modern thinking and the persistence with which it has held that place suggest that before they were, it was, and that it set the limiting conditions of those thought systems even as they in turn have set the limiting conditions of modern American thinking. The former suggestion is foreign to our present purpose; the latter is the fact upon which we are now insisting. t Cf, Dewey: “Orthodox psychology starts from the assump- tion of .... independent minds. However much different schools may vary in their definition of mind, they agree in this premiss of separateness and priority” (Human Nature and Con- duct, p. 84).EQUALITARIANISM I ~J] ‘ J Certainly from the decline of the natural- rights philosophy to the ascendancy of an evolutionary view (roughly from the middle to the close of the nineteenth century) these three currents of thought have been the dominating influence in America.’ Even if there were other smaller influences at work independently, it is not unreasonable to as- sume that the conception that is seen to un- derlie the great thought influences would have had, a fortiori, a determining influence also upon them. As corroborating this pre- supposition, and at the same time showing the persistence of the notion of a soul, the efforts of psychology to become a special science by freeing itself from both theology and philosophy is thoroughly instructive. ‘ It is not meant to suggest, of course, that American thought consci usly identified itself by name with either of these three movements. The doctrine of equality was a popular doctrine, whereas neither Kantianism nor utilitarianism as philosophic movements were popularly known at all. And while the religious nfluence was genuinely reflected in common sense at all stages of American thinking, yet the belief in equality certainly did not re- rict itself to religious justification. What is meant is that the Kantian emphasis upon motive, the utilitarian emphasis upon consequences, and the popular doctrine embodied in the Christian view of the soul furnish convenient and fairly exhaustive principles of classification for whatever thinking did go on in America.174 AMERICAN EQUALITY Traditionally, psychology, true to its name, was the “science of the soul.” Its evolution began when it became “the science of mind.” But upon discovering that, under a new name, old ways of thinking had co- vertly taken refuge, some psychologists sought a definition that could not be so con- jured with, and psychology became the “‘sci- ence of mental states.’”’ Then the nemesis of the past devoured again the fruits of prog- ress, and psychology evolved into the “‘sci- ence of behavior.”? But this triumph was partially robbed of its meaning when “con- duct”” was found to rest upon fixed “in- stincts.”” And current literature bears fur- ther witness to the zeal with which man rises up undaunted to smite again his foes. The re- lentlessness with which the ghostly soul pur- sues man is seen in James’s brilliant and al- most poignant account of the history of the soul-conception. Though as a psychologist he himself had reached the “stream of con- sciousness’ stage, yet as a man and a philos- opher, writing at the very close of the nine- t As the facetiousness of the time puts it, “Psychology first lost its soul, then its mind, and finally lost consciousness altogeth- ” er.EQUALITARIANISM 17 Ww teenth century and representing the most forward-looking thought in America, James confessed that “‘to posit a soul! influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affec- tions of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far as we have at- tained.” V Postponing to the next chapter a fuller evaluation of the meaning of this persistent conception, it is here sufficient in summariz- ing this chapter to emphasize (1) that, being admirably adapted so to serve, this notion of the soul, common to all the large idea- systems influential in the nineteenth cen- tury, did actually serve as the fundamental basis of the American equality ideal; but (2) that it itself is now too much in the cru- cible any longer to serve as an adequate basis for the doctrine of equality. And first as to the adaptation of the con- ception to support a belief in human equal- t By which James understood a somewhat both “simple and176 AMERICAN EQUALITY ity. The clearest meaning of the term “equality” is quantitative. Its strict sense appears in connection with mathematically measurable entities, a yard of cloth, a bushel of wheat, or an acre of land. When it is applied to qualities, they are such again as can in some fashion be measured. While this quantitative connotation lingered, the con- cept itself was put beyond danger of dis- proof through measurement in the bold theological claim that men are equal before God. Now, however, that we have examined two great modern ethical systems, we are better prepared to understand what that phrase meant. Its meaning was wrapped up in the conception on which Kantians, utili- tarians, and theologians were at one, a given self. One does not need to see the products of a mint to predict that they will be equal. True, one might from careful scrutiny and weighing of silver dollars come inductively to the conclusion that they were equal; but he might also from an understanding of the mold predict with confidence that all the products of it would be equal. Not having been able to reach equality by the difficult inductive road, philosophers discovered theEQUALITARIANISM 177 royal road thereunto; they merely assumed the mint, from which equality of products followed of course. Equality before God, when thought thoroughly through, had chiefly to do with his keenness of vision; it merely meant that if anybody could see the core of men—the very “principle of individ- uality,’ as James phrased it—he would see that men are actually equal. God had the advantage in being the only one that could do this. This phrase was, then, but the re- ligious way of putting what the philosophy of the time as truly, if not as graphically, presented. The “given” (and by definition it constituted the human differentia) was in all men equal because it came to them all from the same matrix of indefiniteness, whether that matrix be named, with the Hebrew-Christian tradition, ““God’’; or, with Kant, the “‘noumenal world’’; or, with Spen- cer, the ““Unknowable’’; or, with the non- theological Utilitarians, be left unnamed and largely unacknowledged. Though the essen- tial element of men was pushed beyond the reach of measurement, yet a certain feeling for fact, a certain reminiscence of the quan- titative connotation of the concept of equal-178 AMERICAN EQUALITY ity, is contained in the two attributes given to it from Plato to James—‘‘simplicity”’ and “‘substantiality.”’ A simple, substantial soul furnished to all alike from an un- changing matrix is so admirably adapted to serve as a basis for equality that it 1s not un- natural to suspect the harmony pre-estab- lished;t that the desire for equality created such a matrix as would insure equality in the products. We have already stated in religious terms (supra, p. 176) a partial answer to the ques- tion raised at the beginning of this chapter. We are now prepared to state in terms gen- eral enough to include all influential ele- ments in American thought a more com- plete answer. Men should receive equality of treatment, in the various ways assigned «Interesting corroboration of this view is found in the most extreme arguments to prove the Negro unequal to the white. Be- fore the Civil War, the most radical appeal was to the theory of ‘‘multiple origins” (supra, p. 78), it being felt apparently that if races came from different molds, no more was needed to prove them unequal. The converse implication is clear. When talk of racial equality grew freer, especially during the administration of the late Theodore Roosevelt, there was rather widely circulated in the South a book entitled Has the Negro a Soul? The argument was that he has no soul. Again the converse implication is unmistak- able.EQUALITARIANISM 179 by the equality ideal, because they actually are equal. This fundamental equality con- sists in a common element given independ- ently of the social process, through which, by general consent, it later develops. And so, without violating the common-sense dic- tum of Aristotle’s that justice does not per- mit equality of teatment to unequals, nine- teenth-century America was able to justify specific demands for equality by reasserting, in forms more acceptable to the spirit of the age, a doctrine that, stated merely in terms of natural rights, had been found unaccept- able—the doctrine that men are actually equal. The beggar ejected in rags was wel- comed when royally garbed. Thus through the travail of arduous prog- ress we have arrived at the original ques- tion, “Are men actually equal?” Without here arguing that question on its merits, it must be admitted that the trend of thought in recent years in America has been such as to discount the conception of a fixed soul and thus to undermine the belief that men are inherently equal. When Galileo set free the notion of change by declaring that the earth moves, he started a commotion that180 AMERICAN EQUALITY has not yet subsided.t And when much later Darwin, catching the spirit already abroad in physical sciences, as Dewey says, “‘con- quered the phenomena of life for the prin- ciple of transition,” he planted a leaven of distrust that has worked constantly against such a conception of human nature as was basic to nineteenth-century thought. No- where has this leaven worked more fatally against the traditional basis for equality than in psychology. William James, as be- fore observed, rested, at the close of the cen- tury, his ultimate faith upon a soul. But during the intervening score of years the same war against the same enemy has gone on incessantly. James himself lived to see new light. That the strenuous objections? now raised against “instincts” are directed t The far-reaching effects of this dynamic discovery, though not foreseen, were nevertheless strangely foreshadowed by Gali- leo’s contemporary opponents, but nowhere with more zeal than in the burning words of Father Inchofer: “The opinion of the earth’s motion is of all heresies the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous; the immovability of the earth is thrice sacred; argument against the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the incarnation should be tolerated sooner than an argument to prove that the earth moves.” 2See especially the Yournal of Philosophy, Vol. XVIII, and the American Fournal of Sociology, Vol. XXVII.EQUALITARIANISM 181 against the same ready-made element that formerly went under the name of the “soul” is admitted. Moreover, the motivation of those who oppose it is the same as that which has energized the struggle from Locke’s en- counter with “innate ideas” to the present reaction against “‘instincts.”’ A recent writer has clearly expressed this motivation, in the following words: After all a scientific theory must not only state the truth but accomplish some laudable practical purpose. And the most laudable purpose, in the case of the sciences that deal with human affairs. is gen- erally taken to be the preservation of those things which seem sacred and profitable to the preservers.? . . The social scientist has no need of in- stincts; he has institutions.”? .. . . “If it can once be recognized clearly that the content of behavior is a culture content and not an instinct content, it will be possible to make rapid progress in the develop- ment of such categories as may be necessary for the analysis of the genesis and evolution of cultural be- havior systems.” Though a final analysis of equality may, as the history of psychology suggests, in- C. E. Ayres, Fournal of Philosot hy, XVIII, 604.182 AMERICAN EQUALITY volve a radical reconstruction of the notion of the self, the immediate demand is for a formulation of the inadequacy of a given self as a basis for equality. This formula- tion falls logically into two parts: (1) the given, conceived as measurable, affords no adequate basis for equality, because in so far as “souls,” “minds,” have been found measurable, they have proved unequal. (2) The given, conceived as immeasurable, af- fords no safe basis, because, so conceived, it has historically purchased a formal, general equality but at the price of real specific equalities. As to the first defect, the fact that obser- vation showed men to be unequal did not historically prove seriously embarrassing so long as observation confessedly could not get at the essentials of men. The basis upon which equality was asserted torest was merely pushed beyond the pale of confessed inequal- ities. In this way the natural-rights philoso- phy, by being ever ready to appeal from “antiquity to antiquity more remote,” gave equality an asylum by furnishing it a tem- poral inaccessibility ; the philosophy that sup- planted the natural-rights view, in like man-EQUALITARIANISM 183 ner, gave equality security by furnishing it with a psychological and theological asylum inaccessible to any but God, who, of course, never betrays man’s deepest desires. The testimony of feeling (the pain of the victims of actual inequalities) was indeed adapted, as in Shylock’s famous words, to make actu- al inequalities appear more important than ideal equality; but the influence of this fac- tor was inhibited by the fact that the pain of the inferior (and consequently the inequality that produced it) did not seem so important to the superior, who was the spokesman for both, as did his own pleasure in believing in an ideal equality. The very lair of the soul must needs be invaded and inequalities be shown to reach to the nethermost essence of men. Without being aimed at, this result has actually been in process of achievement through the technique of applied psychology. Such constitutes for this study the profound significance of “mental measurement.” It is, of course, too early to speak with assur- ance; but mental measurement has revealed and measured in the functioning of the so- called “rational processes” differences as significant as those observable physical dif-184 AMERICAN EQUALITY ferences long admitted to constitute gross inequalities, as far as they went. It is difh- cult for even the most blinded democrat to laugh out of court as a hobby of scholarly theorists a process whose significance is so demonstrable as to convert the American military to its universal use during the late war.* Nearly two million men were meas- ured,? were classified on the basis of the re- sults, and were put to serving military de- mands, each according to his measure. In- stead, indeed, of each counting for one and no one for more than one, an A might count for a half-hundred D’s and some must needs be counted out altogether. Only equals were treated equally; inferiors were put on “‘kit- chen police” or given discharges, the “‘hon- orable” nature of which depends upon one’s philosophy of life. The utility of mental measurement as applied in the army was sufficient to stimu- late a wide interest in applying the principle to the pursuits of a democracy at peace. Colleges took it up as of value for an initial * Yerkes, Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army (“Na- tional Academy of Science,”’ Vol. XV). Yoakum and Yerkes, 4rmy Mental Tests, p. 12.EQUALITARIANISM 186 classification of students, and scientific man- agement in industry turned to it as a tech- nique to facilitate correct placement. More- over, Lieutenant-Colonel Yerkes, who had charge of the army testing, has already sug- gested the unexplored possibilities of the method in distributing labor in a democratic society.’ If the deeds of the soul, as mani- fested in the records of army testing, are to be held more important than traditional words about the soul, then souls simply are not equal; for they functioned with every various degree of efficiency from genius to idiocy. Even though the soul be regarded as given, it nevertheless, in so far as measur- able, suggests Fricapertis rather than equal- ity.” Only the old expedient remains of holding that the inequalities revealed through ob- servation and any possible measurement are t Yoakum and Yerkes, op. cit., pp. 196 ff. Then most provoca- tive application of the whole movement to democratic theory that has appeared in America is perhaps henner Whither -D, mocracy? a book with which every democrat should come to terms. 2 A prowing tendency since the war to examine the emotional factors in personality gives promise in the opinion of some psy- ; chologists of plumbing even more intimately the depths of the hu- man soul.186 AMERICAN EQUALITY superficial and that in their inaccessible es- sentials men are immeasurable and conse- quently equal. In the latter half of the nine- teenth century this was the orthodox basis for equality. Dewey, as a young man, gave classic expression to this accepted view in declaring that personality “means that in every individual there lies an infinite and universal possibility, that of being king and priest.”* But the extent to which such faith could go is best seen in the unrestrained dec- laration of Ferguson: Democracy implies infinity. Men are declared to be equal because it is discovered that all men, the least as well as the greatest, have or may have access to the Infinite. The obvious disparities become insig- nificant, in view of this great commonness. Infinity plus a million is seen to be no more than infinity plus one. If it were not for religion democracy would be inconceivable; if a man’s soul is measurable and tran- sient, democracy is ridiculous.? The great change which the two inter- vening decades brought—a change nowhere better indicated than in the education of John Dewey—has robbed that conception of the old-time enthusiasm and left disillu- * The Ethics of Democracy (University of Michigan publication). * The Religion of Democracy, p. 36.EQUALITARIANISM 187 sion in its place. While such logic may prove equality, it is not the kind of equality that converts extravagant superfluities of the rich into a more adequate bread-supply for the undernourished poor. The history of such a basis for equality is refutation enough. The classic example of its meaning in America has been alluded to above. Apol- ogists for African slavery put down without a twinge of conscience that the slave and the master were equal precisely in this sense: they both had infinite souls, and before God there was no difference between black and white, between bond and free.' For, as re- gards, “‘the right to serve God according to one’s Own conscience, “the poorest slave on earth possesses this right—this inherent and inalienable right; and he possesses it as completely as the proudest monarch on his throne.’ Equality that arises from this basis, then, 1s such equality as is thoroughly * No doubt it was this antisocial use to which the conception of “equality before God’’ lent itself that helped to motivate the modern radical change in the very conception of God. (Cf. Dean Shailer Mathews’ discussion of “Democracy,” Dictionary of Reli- gion and Ethics, p. 128 and G. B. Smith’s Social Idealism and the Changing Theology.) 2 Cotton is King, p. 329.188 AMERICAN EQUALITY compatible with slavery. And while perhaps no contemporary example of quite such ob- vious flagrance exists, the logic of industry is at times strangely reminiscent of the logic of slavery. For the unskilled laborer to ask for bread and receive a ballot is more re- moved in time than in essence from Cotton Mather’s slave’s receiving “leave” to attend church instead of his liberty. Equality that is so infinite in scope does not fit finite cases; it dispels them. Such equality is merely formal; and, by becoming an instrument of exploitation to the superior and a source of compensation to the inferior, 1t functions to make impossible any real equality. This 1s the reason why Professor Tufts, in speaking for modern men, declares: ““We are not sat- isfied with formal phrases of equality be- cause we see so many abstract uses of the term, wherein the old equality straightway turns into inequality.’” t Biblical World, XLVIII, 9-14. The outstanding example of Professor Tufts’ statement is the use to which “freedom of con- tract” has been put in industry. It often happens that such “free- dom” means to the laborer but an enforced trading-off of his birth- right for a mess of verbal pottage. To get “effective personal free- dom,” as the British Labor party phrases it, American laborers have had, on occasion to argue against freedom of contract, e.g., Holden vs. Hardy, 169 U.S. 391.EQUALITARIANISM 189 The equality of men, as based upon their measurable aspects, proves thus untrue; as based upon their immeasurable souls, un- safe. Such a dilemma has made the concep- tion of a given soul an object of suspicion. This growing distrust, while quite outstand- ing in current psychology, is not limited by any means to psychology. In every field of modern interest the influence of Darwin has at last been felt. Even ethics is fast recon- ciling itself to a world where flux infects the very self of man. And what is more to be re- marked on, theology itself has felt the influ- ence, in some quarters being merely alarmed, in others impressed, and in still others con- verted. Political and social theories have remained longest immune; but a conception that is being discarded in every other field does not promise well as an abiding founda- tion for political and social concepts. Need- ed, then, by struggling classes a basis for equality that will be at once logically ade- quate, socially safe, and practically effective.CHAPTER V NEWER VIEWS OF INDIVIDUALITY AS PHILOSOPHIC BASES FOR EQUALITY F the impulse initiated by Galileo in as- [ cor furthered by Newton in phys- ics, and applied by Darwin in biology was really to be taken seriously—and it com- pelled such consideration—then the dissatis- faction with the notion of a fixed self—as sketched in the preceding chapter—was in- evitable, after the passing of fixed species. Moreover, this revolutionary movement of thought involved not only the negative manifestation of dissatisfaction with the old psychology but pointed the direction for a positive reconstruction. If we are hence- forth to assert that men are equal, it seems imperative that we must rest the claim on some new understanding of human nature and of its place in the world. In this chapter, therefore, we shall seek to arrive at the newer insight into the na- IgoINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 191 ture of the human individual, an insight which American thought has done more than its share to attain. Though maintain- ing our previous geographical limitation upon this altogether universal quest, we may well feel that the validity of our results will be far from provincial. We shall conceive the task of this present chapter in a liberal way; and while we shall not seek to write into the few pages an exhaustive history of the changing views of the individual as au- thentically reflected in American thought, we shall try to select such thinkers and such situations throughout our history as will do justice to every important motif in our developing philosophy. If, in order to do this, the argument should seem at times to run at loose ends, the procedure will hope to justify itself by its final results. To speak in more detail of the plan of this chapter, we shall set out with a broad account of that historic view of man and his world into which Darwin’s work fell like a bomb. We shall not at the outset seek to do justice to all the far-reaching implications of evolu- tion: but, scouting at first the fringes, then coming face to face with its fuller meaning,192 AMERICAN EQUALITY we shall hope in the end to pluck out the very heart of its meaning for a modern phi- losophy of the individual. That is, using Darwin’s work as a base, we shall go back- ward and indicate in a rapid survey the place of the individual in the American situation and the great emphasis which this pioneer land placed upon him. But we shall see that this practical emphasis upon the individual did not eventuate into full understanding of his nature before the coming of evolutionary insight. Then looking forward we shall see how gradually, very gradually, but with sure advance the whole conception of the nature of individuality, of intelligence, and of its relation to the natural world, has un- dergone significant change. With clearer insight into the nature of human selves, we shall hope thus to lay the basis for an intel- ligent opinion as to whether human individ- uals are equal, or whether, being unequal, there is still reason for treating them as if they were what they are not. I As early as Plato, men had become dis- illusioned as to trusting their dearest hopesINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 193 to realization in a world of change and un- certainty and discouraged as to the possibil- ity of controlling such a world to their own ends with the instruments of control that were then available. This did not mean, of course, a giving up of their hopes, a discoun- tenancing of their dreams; it meant rather a turning to indirection for that which direct means failed to secure them." Since beauty is often disfigured on earth by a foul body, there must be—on the compulsion of human desire—a Somewhere glorified by “beauty shining in brightness.”” And what was true of beauty was for the same reason true of all other values. And from concepts of value, logical motives taking up where aesthetic and ethical motives left off, the asylum was extended to all class names, though the pri- mary motivation was clearly indicated by Plato’s reluctance to admit such concepts t “If no site be found on earth for the Platonic city, its con- _ - J ; ; j 1 Stitution 1s none the less recorded and ensnrined in heaven: nor 1s that the only true ideal that has not where to lay its head. What in the sensu ilistic or mystical system was call d reauty Will now be termed appearance, and what there figured as an imaginary 5 et cee ~ construction borne by the conscious moment Will now appear to be a prototype for all existence and an eternal standard for its esti mation” (George Santayana, The Life of Reason, I,194 AMERICAN EQUALITY as “mud” and “hair.” By the same laws of immigration that in America intermittently set the faces of the many toward any newly discovered El Dorado of gold or of oil, all the more desirable qualities migrated into Plato’s happy Elysium of Ideas. Where a man’s treasures are, there will his heart go also: unchangeable, stable, and ideal, these conceptual classes came naturally to con- stitute a superior kind of reality of which the world that flows by the sense is hardly more than a mere appearance. But, of course, if this superior reality is to have meaning, or is to function, for human kind there must be assumed a certain organ in man, which outreaching the feeble senses will possess him of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Recollection served this benef- icent function in Plato’s scheme. Through Aristotle's genius these class names came to be more earthly and neutral, as befits the scientist and logician, but not a whit less real. They took on the natural- science form of species fixed and discontinu- ous, possessing attributes, the essential ones of which the human reason must discover or remain forever ignorant and impotent. am etlINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 195 If Aristotle succeeded at all in bringing these fugitives back to earth, Christianity sent them all the farther into the heavens. Not only was thus the two-world view standard- ized for the future Western world, but its acceptance was assured by its being made into a religious orthodoxy with sanctions as terrible on the one side as they were beatific on the other. Mediating between these two worlds, the specious and the real, stood hu- man intelligence—reason, conscience, faith —whose function was also made a matter of orthodox determination. This was the herit- age, which practically unchanged in its fun- damental aspects, the modern world came by in due course of time. It became thus the framework also of American thought. It was of course precisely because the work of Darwin was at once seen, both in Europe and in America, to have implica- tions for this hoary idea-system that ac- counted for the universal interest in, and the widespread popular distrust of, his con- clusions. No theory, however radical, that stopped with the boundaries of biology could have caused a ripple on the conscious- ness of mankind. How far-reaching his re-196 AMERICAN EQUALITY search was eventually to be nobody foresaw from the beginning; but enough was seen to make the general attitude one of fear rather than of trust. We are only beginning to see how profoundly and universally revolution- ary was his innovation in thinking. An ef- fort will be made before the end of this chap- ter is reached to set out more fully the mean- ing of his insight; but it is enough for our immediate purpose merely to suggest the perturbing influence his work had on the large inheritance sketched above. The very title of Darwin’s first book— The Origin of Spectes—was enough to arouse the deepest distrust. Those two nouns had not been on speaking terms since Plato's day: one of them seizes the very essence of the world of being; the other fixates the es- sence of the world of becoming. And what- ever relationship had been found between the two worlds was quite the logical and eth- ical opposite of what Darwin’s title implies. In short, species had no origin. To insinuate that they had was so to infect the real ob- jects of true knowledge with flux as to de- stroy them. To destroy the arches ofa bridge that connect it with one side is to render use-INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 197 less its connection with the other side. Since the noblest organ of human nature, reason, does not function in the world of becoming, to destroy the changelessness of the objects of knowledge was to deprive reason of a job. And since the essential attribute of man is rationality, the only remaining moat that protects the citadel of the soul is not too wide for pious fear to jump. Long therefore before Darwin explicitly applied his doctrine to man—The Descent of Man was not pub- lished until twelve years after The Origin of Species—indeed from the very beginning, the opposition had based itself squarely upon the inherited, the sacred, view of the individual. From the vantage point of this profound disturbance which befell American thought in the latter half of the nineteenth century, let us now orient ourselves in the American atmosphere by hurriedly survey- ing the earlier thought regarding the nature of the individual and his function in the world. I] The early problem of American philoso- phy may be advantageously regarded as aris-198 AMERICAN EQUALITY ing from the honest acceptance of two incom- patible beliefs by the original American col- onists. On the one hand, they brought with them the principle of liberty rooted deeply ‘na doctrine of natural rights and eventuat- ing in a consistent emphasis upon the indi- vidual; but on the other hand, they brought with them the principle of authority rooted deeply in a religious reverence for a Deity whose soverignty was simply without reser- vations and heading up in a doctrine of hu- man insignificance. If we follow even cur- sorily the early phase of this struggle be- tween these incompatible beliefs, we shall see that it was the principle of authority that gained the first round of a conflict that even yet appears perennial. And this prin- ciple of authority connects directly with that view of man and his world which in a foregoing paragraph we have hastily de- rived from Plato or beyond. With this point in mind, consider the implication of John Cotton’s reply to Roger Williams. When Williams complained that he had been driv- en out of Massachusetts for following his conscience, Cotton’s long-since famous apol- ogy was: “The erroneous party suffereth notINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 199 for his conscience, but for his sinning against his conscience.” Here is our ancient view well set out. Truth, like the platonic beauty, is a finished somewhat furnished ready-made to man. It lies about; but lest it should lie unnoticed, man has been provided with an organ, con- science, that discovers infallibly to him this furnished truth. It lieth so beyond man that walketh to direct his steps that without louble provision—secure metaphysical this « truth and psychological equipment guaran- teed to get at it—he were hopelessly lost. The exoneration of God, as well as the salvation of man, depends in the last analysis upon some such faith; and so the persecuted no less than the persecutor accepts the premise. But the premise accepted, the conclusion is hard to avoid. Since truth is given and con- science is furnished, whoever does not see it is either a fool or dishonest. Roger Williams was confessedly no fool. He must, therefore. be dishonest: he was deliberately refusing to follow his conscience. Such men deserve to be punished. It is a matter of no concern to us that Williams might have replied in The Bloudy Tenent Washed and Made White, etc.. chap. x.RN 200 AMERICAN EQUALITY the very same language to Cotton had his plea been logical consistency rather than re- ligious toleration; but it is a matter of pri- mary concern that even in pioneer America the individual was conceived in a ready- made world, was adapted to it by a ready- made organ,and was made responsible for the way these mutually adjusted cogs functioned. If we turn hopefully from the outworking of the principle of authority to that of the principle of liberty, we shall find fruit of the same flavor. Consider the Declaration of Independence as an official statement of the American doctrine of liberty. Here one ju- dicious glance will reveal the situation to be exactly parallel with the religious one just noted. The appeal is to the self-evident truth there enumerated. That men have certain rights is so self-evident that a way- faring man cannot overlook the fact. Since the situation is political rather than reli- cious, reason rather than conscience becomes the organ, though otherwise the two terms were practically synonymous for the age. George III and the British parliament were careless of American lives, disrespectful of American liberty, and utterly disregardfulINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 201 of American happiness. But they were con- fessedly not fools. Then they must be dis- honest and therefore unfit to rule over hon- est colonists who saw truth and sought it. It is a matter of no concern to us here that George III applied the same inherited view to the colonists; but it is of primary concern that even liberty in early America was grounded on absolutistic foundations, the true nature of which was to appear in the Federal Constitution. It is well for us to remember that, though our forefathers clearly saw that they could not establish and maintain the dignity of the English throne and peerage in the forests of America, they did not see the similar in- compatibility of believing in a hand-me- down individual functioning in a static world while they were engaged in the chal- lenging task of constructing a social order in a world where every day brought the unex- pected and where individual initiative and flexibility and spontaneity counted for every- thing, making daily the difference between life and death. The early American thinker whose philos- ophy indicates most clearly a feeling for this202 AMERICAN EQUALITY incompatibility was Benjamin Franklin, lat- est in the world’s memory as he was earliest in our secular philosophic annals. The fact that Franklin became our first internation- ally known citizen tended to supplant the erroneous belief that America had no think- ers by the equally erroneous belief that all American thinking was preoccupied with the practical. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Franklin was not typical of early American thinking. No people have been more inclined to run to romantic excess. This tendency is seen in the fact that no- where else in the world has been found a people who took more literally and enthusi- astically to utopias. Consider how long Americans have taken literally and seriously the Jewish-Christian compensatory dreams contained in the Apocalypse. Consider the number of Brook Farms America has be- gotten and regretfully buried. Consider how in our day Mr. Bryan’s eloquent word-pic- tures of the ideal republic and of the grandil- oquent guerdon that awaits the saintly man move popular audiences to tears. Finding themselves in a land where countless situa- tions baffled control, early Americans, likeINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 203 the early Hebrews, converted the scarcity and want of actual fact into the milk and honey of gratifying imagination; finding money scarce and luxuries infrequent, they fled to a land in which the very streets were paved with gold; finding doctors scarce and deaths common, they fled to a fairer land in which there was no death at all; finding themselves prematurely old from manual toil by day and secret tears by night, pioneer women fled at least on Sundays to a land where God would wipe all tears from their eyes and where youth would never fade. Alternating, however, with these moments in which mind ran to compensatory excess in religion and to a corresponding sentimen- talism in fiction and art, were the moments in which thinking must face the specific problems on which tomorrow’s bread de- pended.? Franklin was pre-eminent in the «Santayana has very well synthesized these two types of 4 ° - . thinking in his remark that “‘the American is imaginative: for Sa : : imagination is intense also. Were he not I VOI tliv o much I B I mag | ] fotor { + Ss n the futu I S liate; 1f } ur } S W th ¢ I K wn to nis in terms of number, measure, contrivance, economy, } } - | | » Boe bes . 1+ 2 Une nets veerd and speed. He is an idealist working on matter (Character and Opinion in the United States, pp. 174-75).204 AMERICAN EQUALITY latter type of thinking and gave abroad to America the reputation that he himself sus- tained at home. It is quite probable, how- ever, that had the reputation fitted America as it fitted Franklin, the conquest of this vast continent would have been even more rapid than it was. For Franklin, honored at home, respected in England, and acclaimed in France, was really one of the great inventive minds of our race. The practical outcome of his in- ventive genius need not be retold here. But it is well to note that he generalized the practical attitude in such a way as in a meas- ure to anticipate a much later development of American philosophy. In a way, no doubt, Franklin shared the prepossessions of his age; but also in a very important way he did not. Where religious enthusiasts and political reformers set man with a fixed soul off against ready-made truth, Franklin, without denying that view, was inclined to judge the worth of ideas by their practical outcome. Even in theory he went a long way on the road toward uniting the concep- tions of the “true” and the “‘useful.”’ Early in life he had fallen under the influence ofINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 205 prevailing deistic opinions. With him, no sooner got than applied. A hasty pamphlet was the first fruit of his youthful belief. Its results were as immediate as it was sponta- neous. But he was given serious pause as to the validity of his new beliefs by the treat- ment which he received at the hands of his own converts. As Franklin so delightfully puts it in his 4utobiography: My arguments perverted some others, particular- ly Collins and Ralph; but, each of them having after- wards wronged me greatly without the least com- punction, and recollecting Keith’s conduct towards me (who was another freethinker), and my own to- wards Vernon and Miss Read, which at times gave me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doc- trine, though it might be true, was not very useful.? This suspicious tendency to associate truth and usefulness invades even more sacred precincts in his reply to President Ezra Stiles of Yale University regarding Franklin’s atti- tude toward the divinity of Jesus. After in- dicating his uncertainty and his unwilling- ness to bestir himself much to resolve that uncertainty (since, being very old, he would so soon know the truth about it without * The Canterbury Classics Series, pp. 108-9.206 AMERICAN EQUALITY effort on his part!), he proceeds: “I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if the belief has the good Consequence, as prob- ably it has, of making his Doctrines more respected and better observed.’” After all, of course, there remains a long stretch be- tween Franklin and William James: Frank- lin only associates truth and utility; James . actually identifies them. Nevertheless, Franklin’s own tendency to fall back on this similarity as being of functional value even in sacred matters indicates that in spirit he was not far from the kingdom of James. He might with some justice be called the “first American pragmatist.” Finding the world plastic in his own hands, he proceeded to do his part in transforming both the social and the natural order, forcing each alike more closely to adapt itself to human purposes and needs. “Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis.” In his temperament was reflect- ed, consciously and unconsciously, the de- mands that a pioneer enterprise makes upon human individuality—the imperative that transforming reconstructing energy must be tVan Doren, Benjamin Franklin and Fonathan Edwards, p. 198INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 207 nursed and housed in human centers or let both nature and personality go undeveloped. Itt But not in Franklin alone nor in the direct emphasis upon practice alone is to be found the influence of this American imperative, this bias toward the concrete. In the adap- tation to American molds of an essentially alien philosophy the same predilection also is to be observed. The wos idealistic move- ment from Kant to Hegel, which became the glory of the German philosophic mind of the nineteenth century, dev ee as the ideal counterpart of conditions political and eco- nomic, quite aecnnlae to those that pre- vailed in America of the same period. And yet this philosophy found its way to Amer- ica and became in time the dominant mode of thought here. Professor Rogers has hard- ly overstated the fact in declaring that ““The English adaptation of German Idealism at- tracted vo @ . chhe best speculative intellect of England and America, attaining in the universities a dominance that for a time was almost complete.” This triumph, how- English and American Philosophy since 1600, p. 208.208 AMERICAN EQUALITY ever, did not come about without some adap- tation in the philosophy itself. And the na- ture of this adaptation serves as a key to American genius. Though starting from Kant with its emphasis upon the individual, there was latent in this philosophic move- ment a tendency that ripened under most European conditions to a substantial nega- tion of the significance of the finite individ- ual and so led to a profound discouragment of any empirical attempts to find out the nature of individuals. In England particu- larly, Hegelianism has struggled long and hard to find any meaningful place for a thinking animal in a world already rational through and through.t There were three stages of this imported philosophy in Amer- ica, and there is discernible a common tend- ency in each of them. The advance wave of this movement produced in America transcendentalism, with Emerson as _ its leading spokesman. The second stage is that represented by William T. Harris and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy on the one * Especially is this seen in the philosophy of Bernard Bosan- quet, whose major preoccupation is indeed with the individual but whose major burden is to show that the finite human individual “‘is not an individual in the truest sense.” (Cf. Rogers, op. cit., p. 286.)INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 209 side and by George S. Morris and his school at the University of Michigan on the other. The third stage is best represented by the philosophy of Royce. The common element in each of these three stages is the growing centrality of the human individual and a varying but increasing emphasis upon the significance of time. Let us note each stage more in detail as regards these traits. Emerson got his transcendentalism, which he recognized as just another name for idealism, not from Germany direct, but through English sources and particularly through Carlyle. Now it is notable that post-Kantianism did not develop democratic tendencies in England any more than it did in Germany. Carlyle, catching what the general philosophic sequel shows to have been the inner spirit of idealism, used it as apologetic for an aristocratic, if not an auto- cratic, conception of life. Common men are ‘mostly fools’; and so for most men the best way of life consists in “swallowing one’s dis- gusts, and doing faithfully the ugly com- manded work.’ Great men are the pivots of civilization and the relation of common men to them is not alien to the relation Na-210 AMERICAN EQUALITY poleon discerned between these same com- mon men and his metallic implements of war. And so for the majority of mankind, “the vital point is not who decides, but what is decided on.” Idealism, turned into a rugged romanticism by Carlyle, uses com- mon men to make more lustrous the diadems of heroes of the race. That this whole ideal- istic movement was instinct with anti-demo- cratic leaven is suggested by the fact that even under English constitutionalism it eventuated in Carlyle’s popular hero cult and later in Bosanquet’s overemphasis on the state,’ just as in Germany it eventuated in support of a feudalistic hang-over, both political and military.2. But Emerson, the cultural product of New England and the son of pioneer soil, took this same point of departure and used it to glorify each indi- vidual in every walk of life. His address on. the “American Scholar” was a ringing chal- lenge to individuality in the field of learned endeavor. In religion he called upon each man to become his own priest under God to t See in particular Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State. 2 See Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 211 the undermining of religious hierarchies. And in everyday living he not only discour- the dead hand of the social a but also discountenanced too aged submission to much influence of one’s personal past upon his own present. ‘Consistency is the hob- goblin of little minds.” Loyalty to the here and the now rather than to the dead and gone; loyalty to the spontaneity within rather than to the pressure of either habit or tradition—this was his abiding counsel. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. . . . . In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impres- sion with good humored inflexibility then most when the whole crv of voices is on the other side. Else, tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we » have thought and felt all the } time. and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another. What distinguishes Emerson most from Car- lyle is not this emphasis upon the individual212 AMERICAN EQUALITY but Emerson’s willingness, yea insistence, that this characterization should apply not only to heroes but to all individuals. It is Emerson’s belief that “a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things”; and his further radical insight that this “new respect for the divinity in man,—must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views, ’—it is this theory of human nature and this willing- ness to see it applied as a principle of recon- struction that lead Dewey to characterize Emerson as “the philosopher of democ- racy.’* If one considers the mystic levelling that results when “the individual soul min- gles with the universal soul,” it is doubtful whether Emerson is as democratic through and through as Dewey makes him. But the significant thing is that he remains as demo- cratic as he does seeing that he sets out from a point of view which in other social situa- tions has become the defense of an aristo- cratic philosophy. Influences were at work t International Fournal of Ethics, XIII, 405.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 213 to neutralize the undemocratic leaven that lay hidden in the philosophy which Emerson received from abroad. The freedom of the literary medium in which Emerson and other transcendentalists rendered their thoughts guaranteed that whatever transforming influence America had upon the imported philosophy would be manifest. The second stage, however, of the German philosophy in America labored un- der the disadvantage of a scholarly interest that considerably restricted the free inter- play of American genius. When William T. Harris, in 1867, started at St. Louis, then a genuine frontier town, the Yournal of Specu- lative Philosophy, he did so with the thought of familiarizing American students with the best that had been done in philosophy abroad, especially in Germany. And since he wished Americans to get the true philos- ophy pure from the source, he used the ter- minology of the Hegelians whenever possi- ble. Moreover, he gave a liberal portion of his space to translations of what he thought the best writing then appearing in Ger- many. In summarizing the Yournals work for the first year, he says: ““While the large214 AMERICAN EQUALITY selection of translations has met with ap- proval from very high sources, yet there has been some disappointment expressed at the lack of original articles.”* After pointing out, however, that half of the articles had been original and all the translations had been new, he goes on to say that the com- plaint of the lack of originality was such as not to be met by the kind of original articles that had taken up his space. The complaints had been directed not against translations but against “what its authors are pleased to call the Un-American character of the con- tents of the Journal.’? That is, to many of his readers, even his “‘original’”’ articles were not original. To this feeling that American conditions ought to produce a distinctly American philosophy Harris had two re- plies. In the first place, there was not, thought he, any such distinctive philosophy in America. If so, queried he, “In what books is one to find the true “American’ type of Speculative Philosophy?’ In the second place, if America wishes to make its L ODN Cty 127 2 Fournal of Speculative Philosophy, 1, 127. 3 Fournal of Speculative Philosophy, 1, 128.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY as contribution to the world and is to rise in its productions above an esoteric provincialism, she must come to her originality through mastery of what has already been done. Americans should expect no royal roads to insight: if they were to see beyond previous philosophers, they must first stand on their predecessors’ shoulders. “If this be the goal we aim at, it is evident that we can find no other means so well adapted to rid us of our own idiosyncracies as the study of the great- est thinkers of all ages and times.’’* The cautious limitations thus adopted certainly inhibited any generous display of local color, but it promised solid compensations for the future. And the fact that Harris looked with hope toward the future and that he was so soon to give articulation through his journal to both the founder (Peirce) and the logician (Dewey) of pragmatism, makes genuinely prophetic the words with which he closes the foregoing defense of the conservative policy of the Fournal: Our course, then, in the practical endeavor to elevate the tone of American thinking, is cee we must furnish convenient access to the deepest think-216 AMERICAN EQUALITY ers of ancient and modern times... . . Originality will take care of itself. Once disciplined in Specula- tive thought, the new growths of our national life will furnish us objects whose comprehension shall constitute original philosophy without parallel. But this influence of local conditions, to which Harris looked forward, did not begin to manifest itself anything like as freely on the technical products of idealism in Amer- ica as it had on the literary products of tran- scendentalism until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, thanks to the prophetic nature of poetry. Even before the Journal of Speculative Philosophy discontinued in 1893, the leadership was passing from Harris at St. Louis to Morris at the University of Michigan. The latter was projecting under the auspices of S. C. Griggs and Company, Chicago publishers, a series of philosophical classics whose aim, like that of the Fournal of Speculative Philosophy, was to introduce to youthful America German and other clas- sical thinkers. But Morris, in his series, un- like Harris in his journal, meant to give a free rendering of German philosophy. This of course promised more of whatever dis- t [bid., I, 128.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 217 tinctively American point of view there was in existence at the time. Of the series there is one volume that is of particular significance for our present interest. John Dewey, whom Harris had unreservedly encouraged to devote his en- ergies to philosophy and whose first article Harris had published in his journal, who had been a student under Morris at Johns Hopkins, then a younger colleague of Morris at Michigan, and who later was to succeed Morris at Michigan, was invited to prepare a volume for the series. The choice of Leib- niz’ New Essays concerning the Human Un- derstanding was significant in itself, consid- ering the fact that the exposition was to be done from an Hegelian point of view. Here was a philosophy in which the ultimate ele- ment is the individual and in which the prin- ciple of individuation is the activity called “consciousness.” Upon these two motifs Dewey rang enthusiastic changes in a vol- ume which for its insight into Leibniz and for imagination and spontaneity will reward a reading. Whatever may have been the in- fluence of the volume or of the series on others, 1t seems evident that the preparation218 AMERICAN EQUALITY of this study on Leibniz deeply influenced Dewey himself. Standing on the shoulders of others, as Harris had advised, Dewey was on the way to an insight destined to out- distance even Leibniz. But not to antici- pate, what is just here to be emphasized is that this second stage of German philosophy in America produced a volume which (under the guise of an interpretation, to be sure, since America had not yet reached its ma- jority and the philosophic right to speak in its own name) made the individual the cyno- sure of all eyes and activity the constitu- tive principle for individuality. Even an in- finite absolutism was capable under some conditions of tending toward a finite individ- ualism; and America appeared to furnish the conditions. The third stage of German idealism in America finds Dewey, who spoke for it in his academic youth, its outspoken critic in the interest of a philosophy dimly fore- shadowed in his treatment of Leibniz. There have been many spokesmen for ideal- ism in its third stage, reaching (say) from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the present time. Here must be mentionedINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 219 the long and honorable service to philosophic thought of the Philosophical Review, founded in 1592, and of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. But passing by instt- tutional spokesmen, let us center attention upon two representative idealists who in pre- senting this point of view to our generation have leavened their loyalty to it with ele- ments of native genius. The first of these is Josiah Royce, who began life, as he him- self tells us,t among the Sierra Nevadas in a California frontier town but a few years older than himself. Child of the frontier in the New World, his earliest cultural inherit- ance, as he also tells us,? was a religious philosophy compounded of the two most ad- vanced ancient civilizations, the Hebrew and the Greek. Adding to these deeply con- trasting elements, he came back from his student days in Germany profoundly in- fluenced by the two intellectual issues from Kant, themselves deeply discordant—the intellectualism of Hegel and the voluntarism of Schopenhauer. Royce spent a busy and productive life as professor of philosophy at Harvard University in a nobly serious at- t Hope of the Great Community, p. 122. 2 lbid., p. 124.220 AMERICAN EQUALITY tempt to synthesize, in an American atmos- phere, a consistent world-view from these several fundamental motifs. Mindful alike in all stages of his growth of the profound religious and ethical values of life, he accord- ed Hegel first place and began his philo- sophic career by conceiving reality in terms of thought. Passing on by discernible stages of growth, he found himself in middle life with Schopenhauer and like influences pre- dominant; and so he is better content to de- scribe reality in terms of experience. Of this change and of its significance Royce was clearly aware. He says, In my first book the conception of the Absolute was defined in such wise as led me then to prefer, quite deliberately, the use of the term Thought. . ... While this term was there so defined as to make Thought inclusive of Will and Experience, these latter terms were not emphasized prominently enough, and the aspects . . . . which they denote have since become more central in my own interests. The present is a deliberate effort to bring into syn- thesis, more fully than I have ever done before, the relations of Knowledge and Will. .... The centre of the present discussion is, for this very reason, the true meaning and place of the concept of Individuality.” t The World and the Individual, I, ix.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 221 Toward the close of his life, finding his early religious interest and his later ethical em- phasis supplemented by a growing preoc- cupation with the social process, Royce reached the third stage of his growth in which he preferred to think of reality in terms of “community,” loyalty to which represents man’s highest duty. These three stages do not represent vio- lent breaks in Royce’s life; indeed they rep- resent no breaks at all, but merely a shifting emphasis. But this shifting emphasis was of the profoundest importance in Royce’s phi- losophy. It was the way in which what we have been inclined to call the American em- phasis was manifesting itself progressively in the inherited system that lay at the bot- tom of Royce’s own philosophy. Though destined, as the sequel showed, to espouse a philosophy that elsewhere had tended to subordinate, if not to lose, the finite individ- ual, Royce could not unlearn the lessons of a childhood spent in a mining camp and in the American public school, in both of which the finite individual is of ultimate significance. Though Royce in the San Francisco public schools was early intro-222 AMERICAN EQUALITY duced in a way “‘not joyous but grievous” to “the majesty of the community’* and though he received many more pleasant in- troductions in later life, he never sufficiently overcame his individualism as to be other than “socially ineffective as regards genuine ‘team play.’”? How then is this emphasis upon his individualism to be harmonized with his own growing emphasis upon the community? For, as an objector might well say, it is certain that Royce’s abiding mott- vation was communityward, if he is to be his own judge. ““My deepest motives and problems have centered about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness.’ To this objection one might reply, without total irrelevance, that perhaps Royce’s intel- lectual emphasis was upon the community as a compensation for his insubordinate emo- tional predilection for the individual. Might it not well be that Royce did intellectual penance for temperamental sins? But less speculative and more to the objector’s t Hope of the Great Community, pp. 130 ff. 2 Ibid., p. 130. 3 Hope of the Great Community, pp. 130 ff.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 223 point, Royce’s individual is a community, a his community is an individual. And even his “Great Community” is a rational system, a community of interpretation, to which finite individuals contribute constitu- tively and in which they maintain autonomy ind fundamental significance. For Royce, in his better mood at least, will not have it that his Absolute conceived as Deity shall in his all-inclusiveness negate the humblest bit of finite experience in the process of unifying it with all other experiences into an Absolute whole. ‘There's no god dare wrong a worm.” Whether Royce is successful in the attempt to maintain both an autonomous individual and an all-engrossing Absolute is not of p! ‘mary concern here; but it is of primary significance that, as Rogers says,’ instead of tacking on finite experience, as the English Hegelians had for the most part done, to an Absolute already fully charac- terized in terms of timeless logical content, and having therefore no obvious room for it, Royce starts by taking the finite fact seriously as a bit of real existence.’ And more significant than his start is his224 AMERICAN EQUALITY ending. Through the struggle of many years, the individual may not have been recon- ciled by Royce with the Absolute, but if not, it is an open question whether his Absolute does not suffer more than the individual from the stubborn incompatibility. The ut- ter centrality of the individual for American thought is well indicated by the serious and persistent way in which Royce throughout his whole life labored to reconcile the Abso- lute, which he would not give up, with the human individual,which hecould not giveup. Sharing Royce’s loyalty to human indi- viduality, even to the point of letting the Absolute shift for itself, Professor G. W. Cunningham, an American idealist of the younger generation, quite surpasses Royce in another distinctively American emphasis —an insistence upon the metaphysical im- portance of time. It is of course true that Royce himself transcended the Hegelian right by insisting upon a certain reality for time; but Royce was never willing to admit temporal predicates to be of significance for reality. Just this, however, Professor Cun- ningham not only allows but insists upon. In a fine passage he declares:INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 225 Temporal process is a real process, and reality itself exists through and by means of the temporal series. Time is not limited to the merely phenomenal while the thing as it really is lies wholly outside tem- poral succession; it is within temporal succession and not elsewhere in some eternal and timeless sphere that reality is to be found. The real is temporal, and the temporal, real.* Coming from an early appreciative study of Hegel? to a friendly criticism of Bergson, Cunningham seems to have been more dan- gerously bitten by “the tooth of time” than any other American idealist, though none of the younger generation are entirely free from uneasiness in denying temporal attri- butes to reality. Time is accorded a funda- mental place in Cunningham’s thought throughout for the same reason that it was given an important place in Royce’s thought in part—a mutual inclination to start with, and to conserve, the finite individual, and a mutual inability in psychological analysis to divest this same finite individual of temporal predicates. In his lucid and brilliant chap- 1 The Philosophy of Bergson, p. 159. 2 Thought and Reality in Hegel’s System (1910). 34 Study in the Philosophy of Bergson (1916).2.26 AMERICAN EQUALITY ter entitled “Creative Finalism,”? Professor Cunningham has played up both the Berg- sonian motif of novelty in the temporal proc- ess of reality and, supplementing what he takes to be Bergson’s a-teleological bias, the finality of the human ends for the specific situations in which they are set up and for the rational direction of which they function. Time is not only admitted to be character- istic of reality in general, because character- istic of the individual as our only clue to any more ultimate reality, but it is made even constitutive in the ontological process, be- cause seen to be constitutive in the psycho- logical process. It is not far-fetched to see in this, American conditions at work trans- forming inherited idea-systems. While Eu- rope has long had individuals to spare, it has not historically been so in America. And while philosophers in Europe may have been so favored with leisure and so academi- cally nurtured as not to have to keep up with the rising and the going down of the sun, it has not historically been so in Amer- ica. It would certainly not be exceptional if the American philosophers discussed above * A Study of the Philosophy of Bergson, chap. vi.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 227 worked their way through college and milked their own cows even after they turned to philosophizing. In such matters time counts. And not even the espousal of an absolutistic philosophy, in whose ultimate reality time, it may be, counts for nothing, can keep Americans from asserting to be real what they have found in a newer land among relatively pioneer conditions to be the most real and most significant of all things—the individual bent upon recon- struction and time in which for him to do the job. [V We hardly need to bolster this theoretical emphasis upon the individual by the more practical emphases long obvious to all stu- dents of America life—laissez faire in eco- nomics, natural rights in politics, undisguised praise for the “‘self-made’”’ man in common- sense philosophy. From the Declaration of Independence to Herbert Hoover’s [ndivid- 3° ualism, loyalty to this abiding cause has been more uniform in America than else- where in the civilized world. And condi- tions that produced and maintained this loyalty have been adequate to raise up na-228 AMERICAN EQUALITY tive apologetics and to adapt inherited phi- losophies. But this loyalty has been to the individual as a datum rather than to the in- dividual as a problem. What the individual was commonly conceived as being has al- ready been set out in chapter iv. Darwin’s work was the first serious setback that this inherited assumption, as old as reflective man, received. And the seriousness of this new influence was very slow in appearing. How slowly the genuine significance of evo- lution manifested itself is shown most poign- antly by the treatment Darwin’s hypothesis received at the hands of its friends. Her- bert Spencer saved from the ravages of his own empiricism and positivism a substantial remnant of that fixed order that had served historically as the cosmic counterpart of a fixed soul. This residue he reified, if not det- fied, with an appealing name of its own; put it beyond the transforming touch of human opinion; and made it emotionally compen- satory with the use of a capital. Very much of the old conception of the universe was saved for the common man by the use of that magic epithet—‘““The Unknowable.” Itis significant that Spencer’s public was American ratherINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 229 than English. And Darwin fared even worse at the hands of an early admirer and chief popularizer in America, John Fiske. When Darwin wrote Fiske gratefully, “I never in my life read so lucid an expositor . ... as you are,’ it was before it became apparent that Fiske’s primary preoccupation with evolution was motivated by the desire to save the remnants of a traditional Deity and to bolster up a shallow optimism. Fiske brought a mind of some ability to bear upon the task, later to become very popular espe- cially with religious people, of making evolu- tion serve pre-evolutionary ends. And if we turn again to Royce, we shall find that the same word holds true. As a social theo- rist, Royce, together with J. Mark Baldwin, did something to turn the orthodox Amer- ican emphasis upon the individual to an in- vestigation of the nature and genesis of the individual.* And the resulting contributions were based no doubt upon evolutionary principles. But so far as Royce was con- cerned, the enveloping setting in which he put his evolutionary emphasis made the t See Baldwin, Social and Ethical Int rpretations, and Royce, ; Essays in Good and Evil, chaps. vii and viii.230 AMERICAN EQUALITY emergence of the individual, by whatever process in time, but the manifestation of a self pre-existing and thus made evolution meaningless or useless. To this very proc- ess of rendering harmless a conception so perturbing to many even in Royce’s day, he openly attributes his own lack of fear in ac- cepting evolution. Well might he be fearless where other feared, for to him evolution was but one of the ‘“comedies”’ of the true self; and in the drama all’s well that ends well. And thus it would appear that, spite of his preoccupation with the individual and his half open-mindedness toward time, Royce never took Darwin’s work with utter sert- ousness. An interesting passage from Royce upon this point will bear quoting. I do not grow restive, in listening to the story of evolution, merely because I am well aware that the whole temporal view of things is largely illusory, and that the true Self, far from being subject to time, cre- ates time. I rather delight in this craft whereby the Self thus hides its true nature in energetic nebulous masses and in flying meteors, pretends to be absent from the inorganic world, pretends to have descended from relatives of the anthropoid apes, pretends, in short, to be bounded in all sorts of nutshells; yes,INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 2: + _ plays hide and seek amongst the aeons of forgotten time, when this planet was not, and demurely insists that without phosphorus it could not possibly have learned how to think. The Self has its comedies as well as its tragedies . . . . the comedies are as deep as the tragedies. The Self is as truly present in evolu- tion as he is in sin and in ignorance. These are the World-Spirit’s garments that we see him by.’ This is at best but a pseudo-evolutionism. All such attempts—and they seem destined to be perennially recurrent—are but camou- flaging with modern terms pre-Darwinian views of the individual and of the reality he helps to form. Any view that has evolution stop short of novelties has its stop short of significance for a philosophy of the human individual. As over against all such half- hearted attempts to assimilate into philoso- phy the work of Darwin and of his succes- sors, it is well to set the genuine tenets of a thorough evolutionism. And continuing the historical sketch, our emphasis throughout this section will be upon the distinctively, though not exclu- sively, American movement of thought which has passed under the general name of t The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, pp. 306 ft.232 AMERICAN EQUALITY “pragmatism.” Though the names of James and particularly of Dewey will not be con- stantly repeated, yet it is chiefly from their work that the exposition draws, consciously and unconsciously, its spirit and materials; for it is here for the first time that we find a serious and sustained attempt to reconstruct every branch of traditional philosophy—in- cluding both the individual and his world— in such a way as to bring it into harmony with the results of the movement initiated by Darwin. Neither psychology, nor logic, nor aesthetics, nor ethics, nor theology, nor epistemology, nor even ontology is exempt- ed.t Going beyond the earlier views of the individual, which for the most part ended with the emphasis upon his importance, we shall find here a fundamental effort to under- stand his nature and through this under- standing to lay a basis for such control as will justify an ethical meliorism. The most general results of Darwin’s in- sight have been suggested at the beginning of this chapter. Species, which stood histori- cally for ultimate realities, were no longer t See Dewey’s popular exposition of the scope and sweep of the undertaking in Reconstruction in Philosophy.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 233 to be considered as changeless entities but as processes in the flux. But since the senses are able to lay hold upon such phenomena, the question is bound to arise as to the func- tion of reason and eventually of that whose organ it is, the soul. Since, as we saw, the soul with its rationality was the equipment man boasted for making connection with the static reality that lay beyond the data of the senses, with that metaphysical coun- terpart invalidated, the reason was but a pathetic gesture toward the void, a lonely hand stretched out to empty air. That pass- ing, this itself was bound to go. Both gone, what remained but a biological organism a growing, decaying process negotiating ging, flowing through its senses with a chan world? The first contribution of Darwin is, then, that man is really an animal. We have so often said that man is an animal without meaning it significantly that even yet it is dificult to say it meaningfully. Though scientifically satisfactory to him, on occasion the implication of the doctrine gave even Darwin pause; for from this, as he says in one poignant passage, the “horrid doubt al- ways arises whether the convictions of man’s234 AMERICAN EQUALITY mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.”? No testimony could be more convincing than this fear of Dar- win’s of the persistence into our day of the conviction that reality is static and that truth is an abiding relation between a given universe and a ready-made soul. This was a conviction that was destined to give way before a fuller assimilation of the meaning of evolution. Since man is what he is by virtue of an unbroken development from lower forms of life, whatever distinguishes him from these lower forms must have been attained in the process of evolution itself. Man’s interest, if he would understand him- self, is thus shifted to, and fixed upon, the process. And rather than looking for an “essential attribute” within to account for his assumed superiority, man must hence- forth look to such observable characteristics as his erect posture, his opposable thumb, and most of all to his use of language. But since the first dim variations that pointed to these characteristics would not have been preserved but for a struggle out t Quoted from Rogers, op. cit., p. 134.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 235 of which only the best adapted could sur- vive, Darwin shifts our attention to the ne- cessity of the struggle and the conditions of survival. Man is seen not to be primarily rational* at all but to be fundamentally active like all other animals. Out of his ac- tive struggle in a reluctant, if not hostile, environment have arisen whatever further characteristics he may have. While man is not primarily rational, he is secondarily so. He is an animal who on occasion becomes ideational. That is, from being an animal that is propelled ozs a tergo, as when directed by impulse or habit, man becomes on occa- sion an end-guided animal. The future as a determiner is substituted for the past and the present. But ideas, like all other human No better example than th ise of rationality ne tht of the way th ‘edited with a ready-made soul Men were found upon occasion to act reasonably. The child, who is father to the man, must also be rational—ex nihi/. nihil venit But since the infant does not act rationally, the soul must be not only ready-made but passive as well, waiting until at accounta- 1 1 1" bservant, reading ty it finds itself. This deliberate, but unol ack into earlier stages of subsequent developments is the most nveterate type of philosophic perversity that hangs over as a relic of a world so static that it could not possible produce anything 1ew. Surely it 1s easier to conceive a new pr t to arise in the s than to conceive the puling infant as rational. So to stretch “rationality” not only ruins a good term, but may also ruin a perfectly good infant.236 AMERICAN EQUALITY characteristics, have been born of the strug- gle for a livelihood. This functional relation of ideas to activity is clearly indicated by the sort of occasion on which they occur and by the use they serve in the situation out of which they arise. Ideas are the counter- parts of inhibited activity. As long as the instinctive responses of the human organism function smoothly, man does not have re- course to the response called “thinking”’’; but once these forms of activity are es- topped, ideas arise, serve as stimuli for re- leasing the inhibited activity, and cease to exist once the other types of responding to the environment are normally restored. The enormous economy of such a technique in the struggle for existence cannot be overem- phasized. The survival of man indicates the use of such a variation; the progress of man indicates its revolutionary economy; and the awe with which man has hypostatized and deified ideas shows the magic of their func- tioning. But even if ideas be taken as be- * Cf. Emerson’s lines— “Better it is than gems or gold, And oh! it cannot die; But thought will glow when the sun grows cold, And mix with Deity.”INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 237 ing man’s peculiar characteristic, evolution counsels us to learn the value and function even of ideas from their genesis and not to rob life of its richest product and activity of its most effective control by making pure- ly into contemplative objects what, being born of the struggle, should serve in the struggle." But ideas are capable of being induced by other means than by actual confrontation with the physical situation that in all its sternness would produce immediate death if the initial response were not correct. Prob- lems may be set vicariously by others and ideas be thus induced. That is, in the fore- going individualistic account of the struggle t As a corollary, which for the sake of completeness ought to be interjected here, we have the pragmatic conception of truth. Since there exists no static reality for ideas to copy or correspond to, all terms that apply to them must get their meaning from the process that generates and justifies ideas. Truth is but an abstract and static) way of designating the quality represented by the idjective “true.” The adjective is a less abstract (but still static) way of designating the activity represented by the adverb “truly.” Ideas, then, are true when they function truly; and they function truly when they facilitate the concrete activity the inhibition of which produced them. Truth thus means as many different things as there are kinds of activity to be estopped; but 1t always means something utterly concrete, if its meaning be got at all.238 for existence, a very important element has been omitted. Neither men nor most other higher animals have faced the environment alone. Most animals have lived more or less in groups and have survived because of this fact. With peculiar urgency has this neces- sarily been true of the human species. Be- cause of the ever-lengthening infancy as one ascends the scale, social mediation between the helpless infant and the non-social en- vironment becomes utterly necessary. It is the by-products of this necessity that are here to be emphasized. Even as Saul went to look for asses and found a kingdom, so long before the human organism is able to cope single-handed with his world he is made the recipient, willy-nilly, of all the group’s ways of reacting, is provided with the most intimate and profoundly significant of all group habits—the talking habit with a full kit of verbal tools—and is fitted out entirely with beliefs ranging from the simplest mean- ing that outrun his momentary experience to the most time-defying theologies and theodicies. It is upon this verbal inheritance that we must for a time dwell; for it is upon the tech- AMERICAN EQUALITYINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 239 nique which renders it possible that we must depend for a genesis of the self about which equality is finally to be asserted or denied. Action follows only upon stimulation: not because the organism is passive and must be prodded into activity; rather because activ- ity cannot be dberhaupt but must be con- nected with some specific situation. And while the organism may be surcharged, as in the case of well-formed habits, neverthe- less it demands some sort of a releasing stim- ulus as an antecedent to activity. Stimula- tion is normally thought of as from the out- side, and undoubtedly most activity is thus initiated in organic forms. Activity, more- over, is not only a consequent of stimulation but becomes in a certain sense a function of the stimulus. Who wields the stimulus con- trols the organism. This is an elementary fact for all trainers of animals. As one pon- ders over the far-reaching control that the stimulus exercises over the reaction and thus over the organism that reacts, he is bound to see the enormous potency that would be 1n- troduced into the conduct of any animal who should acquire a mechanism for self- stimulation. It would clearly mean an en-240 AMERICAN EQUALITY larged field of stimulation and thus a libera- tion of initial conduct, with effectiveness guaranteed through power of subsequent self-correction. It is obvious, on the one hand, that no sub-human animal has this power in any marked degree; and it is equal- ly obvious, on the other hand, that this very capacity is the secret of man’s superiority over other forms of life. The dignity of man, as Professor Mead so happily phrases it, con- sists in the fact that when he calls upon him- self he finds himself at home. It is not that there is anything magic about the power of speech. If magic were our reliance, then we needed not to have come so far to find a basis for selfhood. And yet something suspiciously like magic has been the reliance of social theorists in our day. Since turning from a transcendental derivation of individuality, all modern theo- rists have put their trust in a supplanting social derivation, the commonest word to describe the technique for which has been “imitation.” It has been the vogue with sociologists and social psychologists alike, and from their sanction has passed into pop- ular speech: it is everywhere said that theINDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 241 child gets his personality from his group by imitation. There remains yet to be pointed out a mechanism whereby imitation can produce this marvelous result. Imitation indeed presupposes the existence of the self in which it is said to result. Not until the mechanism is indicated shall we be any nearer the heart of our mystery than we were when we derived souls from God. And not even the modern group is as effective a magician as was the ancient Deity. Neither James nor Dewey has supplied this missing link. Neither of these philosophers has em- phasized the magic word “imitation,” but on the positive side they have supplanted it with no more promising medium. Dewey constantly implies the constitutive nature of the group’s influence upon individuality: he constantly assumes that the human self is a microcosm of which the enveloping group is the macrocosm. But he neglects to render this assumption impregnable by pointing out the mechanism through which this novel and remarkable result is achieved. It is to Professor George Herbert Mead that we must turn to supply this lack, the lack of a concrete and solid foundation for a242 AMERICAN EQUALITY hopeful superstructure. His work has been tontranstonm a result, that for all itsiser entific acceptance looked magical, into an explicable and controllable process. The mechanism that renders it possible for an organism to get a self from society is, to fol- low the Wundtian terminology, the vocal gesture. By the happy intersection of two senses, man is at once given the power both of self-stimulation and of self-correction. Man gives an order to a dog, and by giving the stimulus is enabled almost wholly to control the dog’s behavior. Man gives orders to another man, and in so far as he wears the insignia of authority, controls thus the other man’s conduct. But that is not all. For the one who commands has the same sort of ears as the one commanded. He hears the com- mands, that the other receives; and hearing, he reacts to his own commands even, in a measure, as the other reacts to them. That he does react to his own commands, though they are addressed to another, is proved by the fact that he understands the commands: a common reaction as a mechanism must underlie a common understanding, if under- standing is not 1n turn to become magical.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 243 This means of course that when one be- comes able in stimulating another similarly to stimulate himself, he has reached the place where he is an “other” to himself; and can command himself as the “other” that he is. And this means that he has acquired the power of stimulating himself and thus of uae ing himself with all the enormous gain and liberation that is thus implied. The nea of this mechanism need not necessarily be the mouth and ear: they may with lesser scope and effectiveness be the eye and the hand. But the power of speech is so much more adaptable that it 1s hardly un- fair to refer to the mechanism as being ex- clusively the vocal gesture, a procedure that I shall follow hereafter. That one comes to this capa ability geneti- cally is experimentally verifiable; and that before he reaches this stage he does not think, is not self-conscious, has in short no self, seems certain. Bie Keller having reached a stage much more advanced in years than most children without being in possession of this mechanism—the vocal gesture, or any two intersecting senses would seem to furnish a crucial case for Pro-244 AMERICAN EQUALITY fessor Mead’s account. And if one may trust her later retrospective account of her experiences, the theory seems experimental- ly made out. “Before my teacher came,” she writes, “I had no soul, I did not think, I did not even know that I am.’”* This whole book will bear a careful reading with em- phasis upon its facts and their scientific meaning rather than upon its emotional ap- peal and stylistic merit. The human infant starts life like all other organisms that lack the language habit: a natural object in a world of natural objects, reacting only to external stimulation and so minus all self- control. His first use of the slowly develop- ing language habit is used to confess his lack of a genuine self. Even in his own eyes he is a “me,” not an “I’’: that 1s, he is to himself what he is to others—an organism out there. The process of his becoming an “1” as well as a “me” is the process of his acquiring a self; and it apparently comes about through the agency of language. A four-year-old of my acquaintance was recent- ly discovered by his father sitting up in bed in the early morning practicing a remem- t Helen Keller, The World I Live In, pp. 113-17.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 245 bered exercise on an imaginary piano. Paus- ing after each exercise, he addressed himself authoritatively: “Do it again!’: And then he proceeded to obey his own commands, through many repetitions. He was learning to see himself as others saw him, and he was coming rapidly, when he called upon him- self, to find himself at home.? The self is thus, as Professor Mead says, “a develop- ment that arises gradually in the life of the infant and presumably rose gradually in the life of the race.’’’ This resultant 1s achieved t For this illustration and other indispensable considerations I am indebted to a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chi- cago by Dr. J. Goodwin Locke. 21f the barking dog and the singing canary in stimulating their companions stimulate also themselves to the same responses, they too have selves. Though as compared with man their vocal repertoire is severely limited, there appears no a priori reason why a basis is not present for a self as complete as their vocal equip- ment is adequate. If they have no selves, it is because, though having ears to hear, they hear not their own sounds; and having eyes to see, they see not their own movements. It is not to be over- looked of course that human beings differ greatly in this regard student who confessed herself ‘‘a complete wreck when alone”’ to the prophet who spends forty days alone as rein- forcement against his great temptation; or, from another point of view, from idiocy to genius. 3 Journal of Philosophy, X1X, 160 ff. Neither this article, en- titled “A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol,” nor any other of his publications represents the full measure of my it indebtedness to Professor Mead.246 AMERICAN EQUALITY “when the individual becomes a social ob- ject in experience to himself. This takes place when the individual assumes the atti- tude or uses the gesture which another in- dividual would use and responds to it him- self, or tends so to respond.’ Vv We have come thus in our historical sketch to a promising culmination of the un- deviating emphasis in America upon the 1n- dividual. From a purely mystic or purely utilitarian assertion of his importance, we have reached what purports to be an empiri- cal account of the way the individual arises in experience. Starting as an active physical organism in a physical environment, each member of the human species acquires a “soul.” The group is the source, the vocal gesture, the most obvious constituent of the mechanism. The precise nature of this “self” is not to be dogmatized about. Its origin we believe to be temporal and em- pirical; the mechanism of its genesis is now conceived in concrete terms; and its func- tions are open to scientific observation and * Fournal of Philosophy, XIX, 160.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 247 description. In the face of this, 1t seems gra- tuitous to assume it to be an independent entity, simple and substantial. In advance of further knowledge, it need not be assumed to be anything more than the biological or- ganism directing its own activity through a technique that becomes more describable with further study. And as for the future, it will be acknowledged whatever it is found in experience to be. With this restatement in empirical, dynamic form of the genesis and nature of the self, let us briefly contrast the traditional view of the soul. The old con- tention insisted upon deriving selves from a common mold; so does the new account, with an important difference. But the rigid metaphysical and theological mold of the former has become the social and flexible matrix of the latter; and with this change, a soul so transcendentally derived that it could never adapt itself to the exigencies of earth and time has become aself socially con- stituted and adaptable, therefore, to the vi- cissitudes of the social process. The old con- tention insisted upon an inexpugnably given somewhat so fixed as to inhibit any thought of fundamentally changing it and as to dis-248 AMERICAN EQUALITY courage any thoroughgoing effort at remak- ing the social and natural order, which also became infected with its rigidity.t The new- er conception has also its biological given, but its given is plastic enough to raise hope that something may be done progressively to eliminate the undesirable elements of man’s inheritance. Indeed “man’s supreme inheritance,” as Alexander? phrases it, is the possession of a guidance capable of trans- forming the biological as well as the physical and the social given. Its given serves as challenge to change rather than as a sum- mon to resignation: the ideal of pious ac- ceptance connected with the old view is sup- planted by an energizing belief in the ex- tended eficacy of human effort. For while at any given time the self is, to borrow Pro- t The well-known fragment from Anaximander is the classic statement, in ethical form, of this fixedness applied to nature. “Things perish into those things out of which they have their birth, according to that which is ordained; for they give reparation to one another and pay the penalty of their injustice according to the disposition of time” (Bakewell, Fragments, p. 3). The modern expression “‘to get even” harks back in connota- tion to a fixed order, to disturb the equilibrium of which was thought to forbode man’s undoing. 7B. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance.INDIVIDUALITY AND EQUALITY 249 fessor Tufts’s phraseology,’ “‘habit,” it is ‘adjusting activity.” And, finally, this ‘ also newer conception of the self furnishes a basis for such a functional interpretation of equal- ity as makes it further rather than hinder the ongoing associative process. It is to this task that we now turn in a concluding chap- ter. t Philosophical Review, XV, 361-79. + eae ae ee eee ee < eee eeCHAPTER VI THE FUNCTIONAL INTERPRE- TATION OF EQUALITY HE preceding chapter eventuated in the conclusion that human in- dividuals are different in both origin and nature from the traditional assumption regarding them. The net resultant of our discussion there was (1) that selves are or- ganisms capable of self-direction; (2) that the mechanism of this self-direction is em- pirical and most likely connected with speech; and (3) that the technique of this guidance consists of ideas that, on occasion, arise out of specific situations and transform the organism from an impulse- or habit- guided into an end-guided individual. We are prepared, therefore, to make no further capitulation to the common tendency to separate the self from the organism than to admit that, since in common thought the organism is always taken for granted, the self zs the ends which the organism sets up 250FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 261 for its guidance. “The soul,’ as Professor a > Woodbridge graphically puts it, “zs the world as each man sees it.” I It is, then, about this self-directing or- ganism—to shorten our characterization— that our present problem centers. Are in- dividuals thus constituted, equal? There seem three possible answers to this question. Carrying on our democratic tradition, we may unqualifiedly assert actual equality of these same individuals. Or, daunted by apparent facts, we may firmly deny them equality. Or, finally, in keeping with what is commonly believed to be the practice of philosophers, we may, having met a diffi- culty, make a distinction; that is, we may make equality a matter of more-or-less rather than of all-or-none. At any rate, it is obvious that the matter is of such moment for democracy as to warrant us in taking serious counsel with ourselves as to what our final answer shall be. However much we are inclined to have done with our problem in keeping with demo- cratic sentiment, we are deterred by two con- © ey a li rreooeentenatenare Ame252 AMERICAN EQUALITY siderations from giving as our answer the “everlasting yea.” There are, first, the stub- born facts. Men do not at first glance seem to be equal in any assignable manner. And what is more perturbing to the democrat, they do not seem any more equal on the sober second thought than at first glance. Indeed, the longer one thinks it over, the more ‘certain does 1t become that men are not just what the term equality suggests. And the more specific the analysis, the more obvious the discrepancy. These observed facts are strengthened, rather than weak- ened, by evolutionary theory. The process that has transformed the inherited hier- archy of discrete species into a modern con- tinuum with functional divisions for con- venience rather than metaphysical entele- chies has as a clear implication gradations within each species. If the human species, for instance, be surveyed with intelligence as the fundamentum divisionis, do we not go up to persons of average intelligence from idiots, imbeciles, morons, and from average intelligence on up to genius? And any more detailed principle of division would yield a similar diversity of classes within the givenFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 253 species. So clear does all this seem upon re- flection that one might well say that while Americans may have upon occasion felt. white themselves to be equal, they have never _thought themselves to be equal. And this contrast between feeling and reflection leads to the second consideration that makes us pause when we would answer the question affirmatively. It is the use to which the doctrine has at times been put. It is not likely that men would overlook such obsery- able facts to assert such a non-verifiable conclusion were there not at work some ul- terior motive. Feelings are capable of mak- ing a camouflage sufficient to hide the most unacceptable of practices. There is that in man, as Hobhouse observes, that “‘makes him cling to the semblance of right most of all when he is rejecting the reality.”’* Any concept, when crowned with the halo of some transfiguring emotion and endued with pow- er from some ido/um tribus, may cover with a pious, but poison, barrage whole areas of human activity. Man grows naturally shy of emotionalized concepts when he sees that under the spell of even the democratic con- * Morals in Evolution, 1, 64. a creel i ne e-em — * ett254 AMERICAN EQUALITY cept of equality the elemental liberties of men can be conjured away into a heaven- blessed slavery, as in the Old South. The South but furnished an outstanding example of this universal tendency 1n seeking a per- manent apologetics for its inferior type of social organization built upon the principle of dominance. In other fields of life also, equality has been found capable of serving but to mark the spot where privileges indis- pensable for a decent life lay buried—a shin- ing mausoleum towering above pulverizing bones. But such considerations as these have been sufficiently exploited in earlier chap- ters. Deterred, then, both by observable facts and by the questionable practices of many who have overlooked these facts, we find ourselves unable to give an unqualified- ly affirmative answer. But we are also deterred from giving an unqualifiedly negative answer. The reasons here are more complex, and will by some be thought more equivocal. Since we will not afirm that men are equal, it would seem the part of frankness to affirm then that they are not equal. And we shall certainly wish to be frank with ourselves on this point,FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 255 for our answer to this question will deter- mine both whether we are, and how far we are, sincere democrats. Let us set out, then, | clearly the reasons why we cannot unequiv- ocally deny the equality of men. The first is that we are not willing to ' give up a shibboleth that has been as effec- tive in action as has equality. Regardless of its factual accuracy, we know that embla- zoned on democratic banners it has been one of those electric words that have challenged the indifferent, awakened the neutral, in- flamed the zealous. “‘Mankind are more disposed,” as our historic declaration of faith goes, “to suffer, while evils are suffer- able, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”’ We are not willing to sacrifice this effective stimulus to a type of action the need for which is perennially recurrent in a world where lethargy finds a host in corpulent womenandinsluggishmen. Indeed, wehave seen that from the Revolution down, the concept has really been used more to chal- lenge action than to state a fact. This cer- tainly is not the time to give it up, unless we have grown faint-hearted regarding our256 AMERICAN EQUALITY American experiment in democracy. For only within our generation has the battle been anything like won for the machinery of democracy. Men have asserted equality to get the right to vote, to get the right to sue and be sued, to get the right to a free contract and to a fair education. If the asser- tion of equality has helped to win the ma- chinery, it ought to be equally effective in getting some of the products of the machin- ery. The right to vote is not an end in itself, nor the right to sue and be sued, nor yet the right to contract freely nor to go to school. They were made ends of the battle for rights only because they were seen to be such indis- pensable means for fulness of life.* The use of them to this latter end has hardly begun. It is certainly no time to give up a weapon in battle when with the continued use of the weapon, but only with it, victory is actually in sight. If we, however, are to be quite frank with ourselves, we must indeed know that this imminence of a fruitful use of the democratic machinery is precisely the reason for the * The elaboration of this contention is the burden of my earlier book, The Democratic Way of Life.emanate ai a ne en eee eee FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 257 weakening in some quarters of democratic sentiments. No one need be hesitant about his gifts so long as he is certain that they will neither impoverish him nor enrich his enemy. But the democratic machinery which as a weapon has come into the hands of Tom, Dick, and Harry is loaded with dynamite if it can be made to function democratically. Not only is this true as regards property in- terests where 2 per cent of our population owns some 60 per cent of our wealth,‘ but it holds of fields as sacred to sentiment as prop- erty is to calculation. Suppose the majority of Americans should become dissatisfied with the God whom orthodox churches have in- herited and whose worship they perpetuate, and, being dissatisfied, should wish to invoke the state machinery to inhibit worship of him as now it is invoked to protect such wor- ship. That would be a test of democratic philosophy indeed! The machinery of gov- ernment has known such service; and there is in America, especially in organized labor, a developing philosophy as deeply anti-reli- gious as the inherited philosophy is religious ‘King, The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States, pp. 80 ff.258 AMERICAN EQUALITY Nor is the attitude of men of science toward the cherished religious values at all reassur- ing to orthodox Christian faith. Or what if the majority should incline in time to recog- nize in law what is coming rapidly to exist in fact regarding another of the institutions sa- cred to our culture—the family? In America there is already one divorce to every six marriages, and a studied estimate recently put the annual number of extra-marital sex contacts in Chicago at 24,000,000 — probably an approximation to the number there are intra-marital. Furthermore, Amer- ica 1s rapidly becoming urbanized. Sup- pose the majority should eventually wish to substitute for the patriarchal family the so- called ““companionate’”’ as the marital norm. Does anyone suppose that the practices of the majority of citizens may not eventually attain institutional respectability, whatever those practices? These are delicate matters for the present generation; but democracy is a dangerous experiment in every generation to interests that look either to the few or to the past for their justification. But if the ac- *See Lueba, The Belief in God and Immortality. This book in- dicates that reflectiveness and the belief of the title vary inversely.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 259 tion to which equality as a shibboleth stim- ulates is ever justifiable—and historically we have officially declared it sdé—then there seems every logical reason for exploiting the equalitarian impetus, now that the testing time has come. But there is also another reason for our unwillingness boldly to deny that men are equal. By making sweeping denials in a world that is seldom nicely dichotomous, one is likely to do truth more damage than serv- ice. It is so in this case. Consider the state- ment that every man has in him a soul. It is true that few, if any, modern students would wish to subscribe to that statement in the large; but if the only alternative were to deny it 7m toto, one might well choose to affirm rath- er than to deny. For, though we have shown in earlier chapters ample evidence for giving up the belief in “‘souls,’’ nevertheless that statement carries meaning whose unqualified denial would be more a loss to truth than would its affirmation. “The fact is,” as Wil- liam James points out, “that one cannot afford to despise any of these great tradi- tional objects of belief. Whether we realize it or not, there is always a great drift of rea-260 AMERICAN EQUALITY sons, positive and negative, towing us in their direction.”* This is the reason that no constructive- minded person can be content merely to deny. An assertion of equality would have as much meaning and truth-value as would the assertion of the existence of souls to which originally the attribution of equality peculiarly applied. To deny equality out- right would, then, be to do violence to the partial truth of the assertion. This point will bear some emphasis without becoming labored; for the contrast is between the meth- od of destruction and the method of prog- ress. The method of sweeping denial bears the marks of emotional reaction. Atheism in religion, for instance, is a parallel case. Many men, finding themselves in the pres- ence of a belief in a deity whose moral char- acter did not measure up to the level they set even for themselves, cut the Gordian knot by denying the existence of any god at all. This was typically the attitude of critical minds in the eighteenth century. But with the coming of a modern study of religion, an insight into the psychology of religious t Principles of Psychology, 1, 181.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 26: experience, these men and their cause are left in an anomalous position.! For with knowl- edge of the genesis of gods, it is seen that every worshiped god has significance and power. I’o deny existence to what functions in human experience is no praiseworthy practice for a grown man. The important question has to do not with existence but with the nature at id function of deities. The atheist is thus put in the position of ene ing the existence altogether of aoe clearly does In some important sense exist, but the ques- tioning of whose value and significance ought to be, and more than likely was, the real aim of atheism.? Ethical and political concepts are not essentially different from religious t The plight of the Universalists today, as described by some religious wag, illustrates well the point: “they have first to prove that there isa he ll an l then that 2 There rem: pI th itheis be n oth [he f he right to define G 2 vhen he has f h h s litt left of the tra on Lt Will a his right to be positive as well as neg ve TI iemo 1. by such th S as Professor E. Ames (The Psych loz f Relj of us F ¥D rience) of God toa Be ries ideal and the elevation by such atheis s P rM.C.O 1 1 Ideals) of humanity to ideal stature leaves little ground for choice between theism and athei ave temperamental considerations.262 AMERICAN EQUALITY concepts. (The inadequacy and the fruitless- ness, therefore, of sweeping negation consti- tute the second reason for our unwillingness to deny outright that men are equal.) ) This preliminary scouting ought already to have made quite clear the nature of our problem. Our difficulty—an old and ever- recurring one in any dynamic society—arises from the necessity of applying to one situa- tion a concept that arose out of, and got its meaning from, another situation. Our only possible procedure so far has been to refuse either to affirm or to deny in the large; for (progress comes neither through gullibility nor through iconoclasm, but through a will- ingness always to be sen es ae the old so as to conserve its functional value for the new with which it must live.) An undiscrim- inating affirmation of equality has appeared in our historical survey as prejudicial to gen- uine democracy as is an undiscriminating de- nial. To reinterpret is our only recourse if we are to save for the future this slogan that has been meaningful in the past. But to do this wisely we need to keep clearly in mind itshistory. Unquestionably the primary con- notation of the term “equality” is quantt-BUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 263 tative. There is a historical reason why this is so. Of the characteristics of the America that took equality as one of its watchwords, two appear particularly relevant just here. On the one side, the nature of the human individual was believed to be such as to make an assertion of quantitative equality truly descriptive. The derivation of ‘‘souls’’ from a mneeendental mold gave a concrete basis for such an attitude. On the other side, individuals were so accitss in the pioneer enterprise and so welcomed that fe jues- tioning attitude toward a feeling of ec cae would not normally arise: most men would not debate over precedence when their com- mon problem is the fundamental one of sur- vival. Moreover, loneliness itself is an ade- quate setting, if isolation be complete enough, to elevate even a dog to selfhood and to hu- man comradeship. Furthermore, there was neither technique nor ability to measure men beyond the roughest approximation even had the questioning attitude toward the feeling of equality arisen. In both regards our present situation is quite changed. On the one hand America is reaching the place where individuals are no longer an un-264 AMERICAN EQUALITY questionably invaluable asset: we have more individuals in places than we know at times what to do with. Stacking ourselves upon one another in cities, as Jefferson feared, we have reached the place where our method of co-operation is itself oftentimes competition with one another rather than united co- operation against a common foe, such as the wilderness and Indians furnished in the early days in America. This change is clearly in- dicated by our newly acquired willingness to restrict immigration and by the evident determination of both the more educated and the more wealthy classes to restrict the size of their families through voluntary birth control. This metamorphosis that in a half- century has converted birth control from a sin against God into social respectability, and restriction of immigration from dis- loyalty to both country and mankind into a popularly approved federal statute, is a change that appears more revolutionary the more one reflects upon it. In such a society individuals are not so invaluable, to say the least, as any longer to inhibit invidious com- parisons between them. Notions of social superiority inevitably arise from such aFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 265 situation. Along with this increase in popu- lation has gone the change in conception as to what constitutes an individual; and this, as we have seen, does not lend itself to a quantitative evaluation of men. In introducing our third alternative, therefore, we shall be obliged to say that in- dividuals are not equal in the old sense, pri- marily because they are not individuals in the old sense. Starting with this fundamen- tal admission, we shall seek, as it were, “a moral equivalent” for equality. That is, we shall seek to find the functional meaning for the newer conception of individuality of what was originally claimed by the term “equality.’’ Our problem now is initially one of methodology. Our procedure may be for- mal or concrete. Let us first notice the for- mal ways of reinterpreting the concept of equality. Beginning with the most formal, it might be helpful to indicate explicitly a certain ver- bal ground for calling men equal. Human beings, as talking animals, awake to con- sciousness to find themselves in possession of words that apply indiscriminately to many objects and beings, because of course a com-266 AMERICAN EQUALITY mon type of reaction has been found more or less adequate for the whole class. These class names perform more than one function. They serve man as a technique for unifying what otherwise would often prove baffling because of its multiplicity or complexity. In this way they are instruments of economy in man’s mental life. Under the influence of the will-to-overlook differences man is thus enabled to treat differences for the time be- ing as non-existent. But this treating difter- ences as non-existent does not render them non-existent except to that mood and for that specific purpose. Nothing, however, is more common to the will-to-unify than the tendency to generalize the unity that is found to exist for a specific purpose and to make it descriptive of a reality that remains statically what it was found momentarily to be. And there is every degree of this tend- ency, from that manifested by the tempo- rary sophist who camps on a general term to prove his point up to that manifested by the abiding mystic who sees nothing in this teeming world except the Eternal One. There is nothing magic about all this, how- ever: one does not have to drink a shiningFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 267 vial of “golden liquid,” as did the Bishop in Wells’s novel, in order to superinduce this mood. The need served by common class lames is an everyday need. Confessedly, the world is one; but as confessedly it is also many. Confessedly men are alike; but as confessedly men are different. The very fact, however, that the common term “‘man’’ js applied to all creatures of a certain class does not settle the question of equality. ‘All the human beings on the planet,” as Lewis Mum- ford observes, “‘are a unity only for the sake of talking about them.” Even granting that there must be something common before the common name will be applied, the question will still remain whether this common ele- ment is also equal in all specimens. If it is not, then men by the very virtue of possess- ing it are proved unequal rather than equal. Universals, unifying words in language, serve only to show that for specific purposes differences may be overlooked and a formal unification be secured out of motives of econ- omy. The procedure turns on what Mr. Skudder Klyce would call a “verbal trick,’ useful enough in its place, no doubt, but of * The Story of Utopias, p. 304. 2 Universe, p. 1.268 AMERICAN EQUALITY no further significance for our present pur- pose. A less formal, and more significant pro- cedure, would be to treat equality as an ethi- cal and political fiction, just as in law the treating of a corporation as a person is called a legal fiction. This is an indirect, but never- theless constructive, way of getting at the pos- itive meaning of equality. Indirect though it is, it appears at times the most intellectu- ally economical way of reaching a goal of action that by common consent is good. At least it has been on the whole the way where- by law has settled down from precedent to precedent. The rationale for fictions in law consists in ignoring the whole body of facts which for the time being are not relevant in the interest of dealing more effectively with what is relevant. The duties and rights of a person have been laid out from time 1m- memorial: a new form of doing business aris- es that must be regulated for the common good. If it can be treated as a person, then its rights and duties are already determined. Only the execution remains. If, then, the results of treating it as a person appear on the whole just, it is efficient to treat it as aFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 269 person, regardless of how much it may differ in other (for the time being irrelevant) re- spects from persons. Thus corporations are said to have nationality, are treated as alien enemies, are known as inhabitants and are granted diplomatic protection. .... The fiction is due merely to the fact that a corporation is granted by law rights and duties identical with those of a person.* The term “fiction” then, denotes only that certain aspects of the case are consciously overlooked out of practical motivation. The end desired is clear; this is found to be an efficient means to it; but since it does certain violence to our knowledge as a whole, we confess that injustice by admitting it a fic- tion, but one practically justified.2 By its fruits rather than by its roots we judge it. This is a helpful way to deal with the con- cept of equality. But since the justification for any fiction is always its results, we have already indicated the direction we are to «R. Demos, “Legal Fictions,” International Fournal of Ethics, OGRIV. aa: 2The generalization of this attitude into a comprehensive philosophy is of course to be found in Vaihinger’s The Philosophy I, if270 AMERICAN EQUALITY look for a more material treatment of the concept of equality. The very reason indeed for desiring to treat equality as a fiction rather than as a falsehood consists in the fact that the con- cept is functionally useful without being statically true. It is useful because we are still in need of the type of action which the concept has historically motivated; it is not quite true because, for one reason, it de= scribes a dynamic individual as though he were static. But pari passu with this under- mining of the bases of equality has gone also the tendency to regard the whole emphasis upon structure and entity as unimportant. The question is not so much what an indi- vidual is as it is what he can do. And from that changed emphasis comes easily the next step—the individual is what he functions as. That is, the “essential” characteristic of man has changed from essence to function. This has meant, looked at in the large, a shifted orientation in time. Since function cannot be disconnected from consequences and the latter lie in the future, what one zs can better be determined by what he is decoming than by what he has deen.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 271 This change in the philosophy of the in- dividual indicates two important implica- tions for our present problem. Instead of looking backward with the historic inquiry, ‘““Were men created equal or were they equal — in a state of nature?” we are to look forward. And instead of inquiring whether men as static entities ought to be made equal in the future, we inquire whether men, as dynamic centers of activity, ought to be treated equally. That is, we are now prepared to keep on facing the future where the men of the nineteenth century were forced back upon the present and the past. Let us in a word recapitulate the point made in chap- ter iv. Following the conflict situations of the war of the Revolution and the slavery agitation in both of which factual equality was asserted universally, America changed the assertion from one of fact (with back- ward reference) to one of rights or of ideals (with future reference); and pari passu the sweeping assertion of general equality was analyzed into more specific aspects in which equality ought to be realized. But face to face with the ancient tradition so well ex- pressed by Aristotle, and not openly dis-272 AMERICAN EQUALITY countenanced by Christianity, that it 1s un- just to treat unequals equally, America had no answer to the questions, “Why ought men to have equal suffrage?” “Why equal- ity before the law?” “Why equality of op- portunity?” except to fall back upon the past and say that men ought to be treated equally because they are equal, having been created or born so. It is obvious that what threw them back upon the past was the view that human nature is at bottom a static en- tity imported from a transcendental pre- existence. It is equally obvious that the rea- son we are now prepared to raise again the question of equal treatment without em- barrassment is that human individuals are now regarded as forward-performing func- tions rather than as static entities. The new- er attitude of philosophy toward time—an emphasis in the foregoing chapter that may have struck the. reader as barrenly meta- physical—is now seen to be of practical sig- nificance. The truth of any assertion regarding dy- namic individuals depends partly upon the results of the assertion itself. The claim that individuals are equal is true if it functionsFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 273 truly; and this will be determined by the effi- ciency with which the claim promotes the ma- jor good of the situation that motivates the claim. This looking to the fruits of the claim for its truth-value is here called “‘functional equality.”’ From one point of view, this is merely a new name for an old way of think- ing. Whatever newness there is grows out of the fact that an old concept when applied tO a new person in a new world must share somewhat in the process it describes. There are those who do not feel that the word “new” has been wronged when it is applied to the world since Darwin’s Origin of Species and to man since his Descent of Man. Func- tional equality is the meaning that remains for the old concept when it is used to describe this functional individual moving in a con- stantly changing world. We have already seen some reasons, and shall yet see more, for believing that even in early America those who used the term “equality” had vaguely glimpsed the fact that its truth- value lay ahead, in the consequences of their asserting it. All this means, of course, that were we inclined to answer outright that men are274 AMERICAN EQUALITY ~ actually unequal; we should still not be es- topped, as were our predecessors, from con- sidering on its merits the further question whether men ought not still to be treated as if equal. But rather than deny that men are equal, it has seemed historically fairer to say that the term has lost its original significance through the changing conception of the hu- man individual to which the term is applied. It was quantitative before, because applied to a static object; but now that the object has become dynamic, the question as to equality of these activities 1s in a certain sense irrelevant. This consideration was meant to receive justice in the earlier char- acterization of equality as a philosophic fic- tion, corresponding in jurisprudence to legal fictions. But of course the term fiction so used has not a destructive, but a construc- tive, connotation. Finding certain genuine values that can be most economically pre- served through this sort of indirection, the end is held to justify the means. The term “equality” has historically under certain describable conditions served as an adequate stimulus to needed action. If equality of treatment produces consequences of maxi-FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 275 mum desirability, then the treatment is jus- tified, regardless of whether men are equal in the old sense or not. If the traditional virtue called: “justice” disagrees, as Aris- totle thought, so much the worse for the traditional concept of justice. When justice is at outs with goodness, then justice also must be reinterpreted, or we must seek a higher virtue than justice. If equality, functionally interpreted, is at the heart of democracy, then democracy is at stake in our answer to the test question ‘“‘Should men be treated equally?’ Here we challenge the interests and emotions of men, even more than their intelligence. And even if the argument is to end in incompatible tastes so fundamental as to defy further analysis, there are many considerations that a democrat may urge in favor of an afirma- tive answer, before the ultimate impasse is reached. During the remainder of this chap- ter we shall seek to set these considerations out. Not only to his opponent, however, does the democrat put the challenge in rais- ing this question; but all the while (since here one’s foes may be within his own house- hold) he is probing the extent of his own276 AMERICAN EQUALITY democratic loyalty as he indicates the rela- tionships in which, and the measure to which, equality of treatment should be applied. This may but serve as a seasonable reminder that to be a democrat even in America does not necessarily mean to be democratic through and through. II The chief consequences that may be urged as justifying equality of treatment are fairly comprehended under the term “‘co-opera- tion.” It will hardly be thought to demand argument that men work together better when they regard themselves as substan- tially equal. Indeed in so far as inequality 1s confessed and paraded, co-operative activity is certainly inhibited. Activity may go on: one working for another, or another directing the one. But neither true co-operation nor maximum efficiency nor happy content- ment? exists. The advantages, therefore, of co-operation constitute so far forth justifi- «Mr. Arthur Moore in a thoughtful article entitled “Bolshe- vism from an Eastern Angle” (Atlantic Monthly, May, 1923, pp- 690 ff.) sets out this deep desire for social equality as being the very heart of the unrest in the East that has followed the World War. The source of the unhappiness of subject races everywhere is, he thinks, “the insults to human dignity that vain pride and social superiority inflict.”FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 277 cation for the functional philosophy that holds that men ought to be treated equally. Let us, then, evaluate co-operation to see whether men ought to be treated as if they were equal. To live and then to live well—first to guarantee life and then to promote the good life—these have ever been the tasks of man, and this their order. Neither task has been possible apart from co-operation. The world was not made for man, as Kallen remarks, but in it he happened and grew. Against this “reluctant cosmos,” as Perry conceives it, only man’s united efforts have prevailed. As Bagehot so well puts the whole matter, The progress of man requires the cooperation of men for its development. That which any one man or any one family could invent for themselves is ob- viously exceedingly limited. And even if this were not true, isolated progress could never be traced. The rudest sort of cooperative society, the lowest tribe and the feeblest government, is so much stronger than isolated man, that isolated man (if he ever existed in any shape which could be called man) might very easily have ceased to exist. The first principle . . . . is that man can only make progress in “cooperative groups.’ ' Physics and Politics, p. 212. y t 3278 AMERICAN EQUALITY And even with the utmost measure of co- operation attained, in the sweat of his brow has man eaten his bread. Malthus thought that man, voyaging forever between the Scylla of a geometrically increasing popula- tion and the Charybdis of an arithmetically increasing food production, must forever be broken upon the shallows of misery. The fear of such an irremediable fate, with basis real enough in Malthus’ day, has been grad- ually lifting since his day, but lifting because of a growing co-operation. For man’s learn- ing to apply to the problem of population an intelligent control born of scientific co-opera- tion and to the problem of food supply an ever enlarging industrial co-operation has provided whatever brighter tints the picture has today. “Civilization,” as Daniel Web- ster remarked, “‘begins and ends with the plow.” The great urban centers of the world have only a few weeks’ margin between them and starvation, and hardly more than two harvests shield the whole human race from extinction. The increasing production since the Industrial Revolution, thinksFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 279 Woods,’ has been more due to an enlarged human association than to the introduction and improvement of machinery. Man’s greatest ally against nature has been other, men. But for the priceless boon of an associa- tive heart, furnished in Plato’s myth? by the pitying gods, man could not now survive, could never have survived. Such a picture of nature as Bertrand Russell has drawn in his The Free Man’s Worship, whether true or not, is of abiding influence, on the negative side, in keeping before modern men the old- est and the sternest sanction of a working equality; for, as Blackstone observed, “‘it is the sense of their weakness and imperfection that keeps mankind together.’’4 This, then, constitutes the extrinsic value of co-opera- tion, its efficiency as an instrument for sufh- ciently exploiting nature as to make human life possible at all. But to this negative sanction for co-op- eration, there is added, as inherent in our ‘Garman Commemorative Studies in Philosophy and Psychol- ogy, chap. ili. 2 Protagoras, 322. 3 Mysticism and Logic, p. 46 ff. 4 Commentaries, Introduction, p. 32.280 AMERICAN EQUALITY social derivation of the self, a positive value, the one most dear to the solicitous gods.’ The brutes could live. It was reserved for man alone to find and enjoy the good life. But he must build upon the foundation pro- vided: that co-operative spirit that enabled him to live at all would also, if sufficiently extended, beget the good life. Co-operation is intrinsically good. Where two or three are gathered together in harmony, a new value- presence arises: “All,’ as Emerson re- marked, “become wiser than they were.” It was the deep-lying recognition of this ele- mental truth by Whitman that has made him the poetic spokesman abroad for Amer- ican democracy.” The all-importance of this natural relation between men not only gained intellectual recognition but provided the foundation for Whitman’s temperament as well. With prophetic insight he postulat- ed human friendliness as “The Base of All Metaphysics” and answered his critics with “the dear love of comrades.” t Protagoras, 322. 2“Of Equality—as if it harm’d me, giving others the same chances and rights as myself—as if it were not indispensable to my own rights that others possess the same.”FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 281 I hear it was charged against me that I sought to de- stroy institutions. But really I am neither for nor against institutions, (What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?) Only I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city of these States inland and seaboard, And in the fields and woods, and above every keel little or large that dents the water, Without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument, The institution of the dear love of comrades. Born into a group, nurtured by it until there arises within him a microcosmic “‘soci- us,’ the express image of the enveloping social macrocosm, man is pre-committed to the co-operative life. To flee from it is not to escape: it is the wings wherewith he flies. Ineradicably social at his worst, man at his best finds in association with his fellows both meat and drink, stimulation to growth and opportunity for relaxation. George Eliot was plumbing this truth when she declared, "We can have the highest happiness—such as goes along with being a great man—only by having wise thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world.” “Walk from the people,”’ as the French proverb goes, “‘and282 AMERICAN EQUALITY you walk into night.” To taste the water from this fountain of meaningful community is but to yearn to drink, and to drink is to find the life more abundant.’ The profound significance of this co-op- erative life Royce has caught and presented in his emphasis upon loyalty. Indeed he feels himself able to summarize the whole of ethics in the counsel, “Be loyal to loyalty.’” To lose one’s self even in a bad cause 1s a virtue, and to sink one’s self in service of a universal community is the summum bonum of ethics and the heart of religion as well. ‘How prudently,’ as Wendell Phillips ob- served, ‘““most men sink into a nameless grave, while now and then a few forget them- selves into immortality.”’ No one 1n our lit- erature has more beautifully indicated the ideal dimension of the co-operative relation- ship than has George Eliot in the poem en- titled ““The Choir Invisible.”’ t The early Greeks, as Zimmern declares, “went down to levels that reason had not yet plumbed and embodied the elemen- tal unselfishness—the sense of one human being’s natural relation to another—which was the germ of Greek citizenship as of all good citizenship since. .... There is no true fraternity which does not grow, as it grew in Greece, out of the plain primaeval emo- tions of friendship or family” (Greek Commonwealth, p. 70). 2 The Philosophy of Loyalty.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 283 The utter centrality of oneness with his group is nowhere more eloquently proclaimed by the average man than in his longing, backward glances at infancy. The reason for the constant inclining of the human heart back to childhood is not far to seek. The human individual, created initially by a group act, is dependent upon the group through an ever lengthening infancy for all that he has, is, or is to become. The harsher physical environment that would bring him death in a day is so mediated to him by social influences as to turn what otherwise were an inevitable doom into a heaven of love fairer than the most enchanted fantasy. And even the inhumanities that man shows man are themselves left also with the harsher sandals of physical facts at the threshold of the human nursery. As the infant sees no oruff lineament of Nature’s face that can possibly be concealed from him, so also he discovers only the smiling, caressing moods of the Janus-faced human world. His food is warmed and sweetened if not predigested for him; his clothing is softened; and his ran- dom movements are constituted, a reper- toire on a royal stage where every gesture Is284 AMERICAN EQUALITY enthusiastically encored. In his world, fire is hot but never burns; winter is cold but never freezes; want is pinching but seldom pinches. His facts are tamed down with fancy, and his beliefs are toned up to story form. In short, as organically related to the group he is bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; so, culturally related to it, he 1s warp of its good fortune and woof of its success. 3orn thus into a mediating, comforting sroup and sustained by it through helpless years, man would not be the animal he is if, when later confronted by that sterner side of his human world and disillusioned by the gruff demands of his physical environment that his food be paid for with sweat and fa- tigue and his meager comforts be bought with troublesome foresight, he did not turn back in pained surprise upon his early fairy godmother for confirmation of his rosy ex- pectations. [he heaven that lies about us in our infancy is the one great influence through- out human life. Dimly remembered and ut- terly unrecognized images from this forgot- ten land we project to form our later social utopias. For its reinstatement we unknow- ingly strive in our quest for romantic love.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 285 And in our religious devotion we flee reality crudely to reconstruct in a timeless, pain- less, sexless, dreamless clime what we real- ized in all its mystic fulness ere shades of the prison house began to close upon us. For a reinstatement of this satisfying oneness of man with men humanity’s seers and mystics have always yearned. But the Greek poets, Hebrew prophets, and modern dreamers have not been alone in highly evaluating man’s life with man. Foreign dangers that kings once created in order to attain unity at home, modern de- mocracies can almost find heart at times to welcome. So intrinsically good is group soli- darity that it appears at times to compensate for any price. Dewey says, No wonder that at times catastrophes that effect men in common are welcomed. For the moment they turn science away from its abstract technicalities into a servant of some human aspiration; the hard, chilly calculations of intellect are swept away by floods of sympathy and common loyalties.’ Through dominance to competition, through competition to enlarged co-operation, the spirit of man has gradually been pushing its t Human Nature and Conduct, p. 258.286 AMERICAN EQUALITY way in all the three greatest human inter- ests—religion, government, industry." In in- dustry the slowest progress has been made. And yet even there improved forms of asso- ciation, supplemented by mechanical inven- tions, have during the last hundred years made possible for even the common laborer ‘n most fields a margin of leisure that only feudal lords once enjoyed, a priceless boon that Aristotle supposed could never be avail- able to more than a small minority and to them only through the serfdom of all the rest.? “The profound truth is that the prime source of modern industrial progress 1s in human association.’ While much has been vained, more remains to be done. The un- measured tracts of industry that still are un- conquered for the principle of co-operation furnish perhaps the chief, though not the only, contemporary } attempt to find a solid basis for human istification for any . on iene. equality , 2 Edwin E. Slosson estimates that h of us has in terms of 1 Slaves Walt-FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 287 Itt The validity of rendering thus in terms of co-operative practice equality of treatment is justified not only in our day but may be shown to get historic significance by an analysis of certain past situations in which equality, however conceived, has become prominent. It seems fairly certain that co- operation has traditionally been more closely related to the claim of equality than we have recognized. In general, it is the conflict- situation, as we have seen, out of which the notion of equality most certainly arises. War has proverbially stimulated group solli- darity—groups that did not so react carried with them into oblivion the tale of their dis- union. While co-operation implies shared ideas, a common danger from which to flee is more compelling than a common good to be achieved. In the latter, co-operation be- comes the price of a good life; in the former, of any life at all. Just as men avail them- selves of the fiction of present equality for the sake of the co-operation thus insured, so historically they claimed actual equality in order to account for co-operation already achieved. Co-operation was the direct an-288 AMERICAN EQUALITY swer to certain concrete situations, and was prior; the conception of equality was the ex- planation and was subsequent. Rationaliza- tions are likely, through analogies, to seek far-away bases, ultimate causes, as in the case of the ready-made and God-given soul. A bright star noticed simultaneously with the birth of a child becomes subsequently the symbol of his virtue and the cause of his achievements. As regards the similar claim of extended kinship among the early Greeks, Professor Tufts, with keen insight, has em- phasized this tendency: It is indeed very probable that the unity of blood which is believed to be the tie binding together the members of the group, is often an afterthought or pious fiction designed to account for the unity which was really due originally to the stress of common This correlation of the claim of equality with the benefits of co-operation gratefully remembered from the past, or existing in the present, or foreseen to be desirable, consti- tutes the real significance of Ritchie’s dec- laration that equality is an “outgrowth of aristocratic and slave-holding communities.” * Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, p. 45. * Ritchie, Natural Rights, p.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 289 Men born into a social order not of their own fixing, have found themselves co-operating rather fully with some, fighting with others (which also involves a certain elemental form of co-operation, as is shown by the evo- lution of rules of war), and sometimes scorn- ing others (being too proud to fight marks the climax of the anti-co-operative spirit). For the various degrees of co-operation, there have always arisen corresponding gra- dations in equalitarian claims. Due partly to diverse languages, early groups, for example, did not co-operate enough to share a com- mon god.' And so their gods were always at war with each other, as were the people. But when the people found a way of work- ing together, the gods tended to fuse into one. But if the relation between the groups was not one of perfect co-operation, there would be, long after the deity was shared, a “‘favored-nation”’ clause tacitly understood to regulate the sharing. But through many factors, more often than not quite outside human control, men were thrown together, were forced through the compulsion of com- mon danger and common work to co-operate t Tbid., p. 254.O AMERICAN EQUALITY 29 in increasing measure. Pari passu with the process, the concept of equality grew apace. But equality was flexible even as co-opera- tion was of varied degrees. After the time that all men are granted equal, some are only equal enough to fight together, others to work fs in a ace time, others to eat fon eeneseny ma eax. Onn har together, Ot thet INtTEr Marry, ana GuAcis. though much later, get equal enough to join Ph eae aRetiC on Ghilnecahie clin the same artistic or philosophic club very a ah Selec ahe een ese new claim of equality bespeaks some prio advance of the co-operative spirit. Even such a non-committal generality as equality before God ra claim, be it ever remen nbered, compatible with slavery, even in nineteenth- century America—marked some measure of co-operation; for it reflected a social organi- zation in which men, though slave and mas- ter, did have contact and did work for some general common ends. The strength of this tendency to rationalize co-operation under the term “equality” is seen in the fact that even lower animals—whose inferiority 1s so y, whenFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 291 great, according to Ritchie,’ as to constitute the most fundamental abiding contrast that makes for a consciousness of equality among men—may attain a certain equality with man. Animals that serve or attend man in such close and constant ways as to seem to share man’s ends tend just so far to be admitted into the family of equals. With psychologi- cal insight as well as dramatic warrant, the unknown author of Gammer Gurton’s Needle represents the cat as a full-fledged member of that simple, indigent family. And all or- ders of the “patient brutes’ that plod help- fully by the side of man have come so far on the road to equality as to be proposed as candidates for immortality by no less a per- sonage than William James.? In fact, whatever conditions—whether of common tribal membership, or common dan- ger to be met, or common good to be achieved —have made for co-operation, have found their final conceptual and emotional expres- sion in claims of human equality. Under the stress of a common danger, the Revolution- ary fathers were fired to great enthusiasm ‘Op. cit., p. 246. 2 Human Immortality, p. 35.292 AMERICAN EQUALITY by the assertion of equality in the Declara- tion of Independence. The precise meaning they attached to the assertion, if any, 1s rel- atively unimportant; it was the common tasks of a new world supplemented by a common menace from the old that made po- tent as dynamite a conception that had lain harmlessly dormant in the minds of Eng- lishmen from the time of Locke. Like knows like: co-operation recognized its expression. In similar manner the common hardships and tasks and dangers of frontier life—ideas made common by unrelenting nature—have found expression in equalitarian terms in the successive democratic East-bound waves that havemadethe Westaconstantly perturb- ing factor in American life.* It is certain that the belief in equality which, by common con- sent, has everywhere been strong among American pioneers did not spring out of the blue, but out of the innumerable voluntary associations that so impressed De Tocque- ville. He was not quite certain that, as he phrased it, there is a “necessary connection between the principle of association and that of equality,” but he was greatly impressed, t Godkin, Problems of Modern Democracy, p. 26.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 293 not to say perturbed, by the surprising num- ber of voluntary associations which he ob- served in the New World. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispo- sitions, constantly form associations. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; they found in this manner hospitals, prisons, and schools. The Americans form associations for the smallest undertakings. They seem to regard it as the only means they have of acting.? De Tocqueville’s observation in the early nineteenth century is paralleled by Santa- yana’s observation in the twentieth century: There is one gift or habit, native to England, that has not only been preserved in America unchanged, but has found there a more favourable atmosphere in which to manifest its true nature—I mean the spirit of free cooperation . . . . this slow coopera- tion of free men, this liberty in democracy—the only sort that America possesses or believes in. The omnipresence in America of this spirit of coop- eration, responsibility, and growth is very remarkable.? * Democracy in America, II, 129-30; cf. Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 343. 2George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, pp. 194 ff.294 AMERICAN EQUALITY } + And as Santayana goes on to observe, Where individuality is so free, cooperation, w hen it is justified, can be all the more quick and hearty. Everywhere cooperation 1s taken for granted, as something that no one would be so mean or short- sighted to refuse... .. The general instinct is to > ' run and help, to assume direction, to pull through somehow by mutual ad iotation, and by seizing on the easiest practical measures and working com- promises. | The great avalanche of equalitarian sen- timent that was thrust against slavery by the abolitionists followed upon such vivid pictures of racial co-operation in the hum- drum of daily duties and domestic life as are ideally set out in Uncle Tom’s Cadin. If men, women, and children could work to- gether as in the pictures drawn, then were they indeed equal for all practical purposes. Moreover, the moral resultant of this book, and of similar propaganda, upon the reader was anirresistiblesympathy, which, true to its derivation, is itself a form of co-operation. [t is instructive to note that it has always been chiefly in the North where the belief | in significant racial equality has flourished. The two races have not yet, as a matter ofFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 295 simple fact, learned in any large measure to co-operate. The actual observation of daily non-co-operative relations in everything from the tone of voice used in daily greeting on up to the law court itself, makes it difficult for a southerner to assert equality except in otherworldly terms, because constant con- tact with concrete inequalities continuously repeated has produced a kind of paralysis of the imagination. But those not instructed by constant clashes find it easier to assert thoroughgoing equality because they find it easy to imagine actual co-operation. To say that the races ought to be equal, in whatso- ever way, is but to assert that in that way co-operation would be advantageous. The history of organized labor in America is also instructive as showing assertions of equality to arise out of co-operative activity. Close association made imperative, willy- nilly, through the factory system, came as a result of the Industrial Revolution with its large-scale machine production. This invol- untary association took the voluntary form of labor unions early in the nineteenth cen- tury, 1.€.,as soon asa common enemy emerged in the form of the capitalist or, sometimes296 . AMERICAN EQUALITY more impersonally, “‘the system.” These as- sociations were motivated both by a common danger anda common good. The enforced co- 1 yperation of workers among themselves made them equal with each other and made it easy for them to imagine an extension of the co- operation that would include the employer hthem. Theclaimofequalityamong 1emselves has grown increasingly emphatic eS . danger sufhciently imminent and serious, equality has been applied in an almost unre- stricted manner. The fact that the unions had in their inception to reckon as their ene- mies not only the employers but the whole legal and judicial machinery has helped long after the event to give their solidarity a mar- ial flavor.t It is to be noted, however, that their claim of equality does not for the most part outrun their membership, that within the group it tends to rise and wane in keep- ing with the degree of external danger, and that discipline is very difficult to enforce in peacefuland prosperoustimes. Equality pro- duced by any such conflict-situation clearly indicates its relation to the enforced co-op- I — af) ‘ne? J } 7 f oy - + Groat, Organized Labor in America, pp. 38 ff.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 297 eration; for as soon as the common danger relaxes, they both tend to pass together. The most searching test, as Meredith sug- gests,t as to whether groups regard them- selves significantly equal is intermarriage. If there is sufficient elemental dumb compati- bility as not to make sex relations appear offensive, it indicates that concrete co-opera- tion has progressed far enough to warrant an admission of equality. The farther groups are from unrestricted intermarriage, the more likely it is that the assertion of equality, if made at all, functions really as an instru- ment of exploitation for the more astute, of compensation for the weaker. While this is the significance of marriage, as regards co- operation between the groups concerned, it does not necessarily hold between the parties to the marriage. It is significant that equal- ity has not traditionally been asserted as be- tween husband and wife. While before the common law they were one, he was the one: a relation of dominance rather than of any fuller measure of co-operation. The hard and fast differentiation of function, the practical- ly exclusive distribution of labor, has tended 1H. O. Meredith, International Journal of Ethics, XV, 33 ff.298 AMERICAN EQUALITY strongly to make real co-operation between the sexes, even in marriage, impossible, be- cause it has inhibited a sharing of ends.’ Only in regard to sex and parental rela- tions did there grow up in the past sufficient co-operation through common purposes to justify the label of equality, and not always there. Of course, on the other hand, a frank male dominance has not been often avowed. The physical and economic inequality of woman took rather the compensatory form of attributing moral superiority to her, and of crowning her too often passive, or even unwilling, sexual acquiescence with the “glory of motherhood.” It is only in very recent times, when opportunities have arisen for the sexes to get the same training and to doFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 299 the same work, that concrete sharing of pur- poses, genuine forms of co-operation, have arisen.* And, concomitantly, less is heard about either the legal superiority of the hus- band or the moral superiority of the wife. With the increase in co-operation, there is an increased tendency, as well there may be, to talk in terms of plain equality between them. IV It has been suggested more than once in this study how the large, abstract claim of equality—whether put in religious or natu- ral or political terms—has served to inhibit real, concrete equalities. The claim of equal- ity has not always, however, militated thus against actual co-operation. It has done so only when it claimed far more than the then progress of co-operative enterprises warrant- ed. Whenthiswasdone,somesortof vicarious adjustment was necessary to cover the defi- ciency, and it usually took some compensa- tory form. Where there has not been this ex- *“The reason why friendship means more to men than to women, and why they associate so much more easily and freely, is that... . they work together..... Men meet one another freely in their work, while women work alone.” (Charlotte Perkins Stetson [Gilman], op. cit., pp. 306-7.)300 AMERICAN EQUALITY cessive slack (to be taken up by emotional effusiveness) between the claim of equality and the actuality of co-operation, the claim has seemed to have some worth as an instru- ment for furthering genuine equality. With- out, then, in general denying to concepts a certain efficacy in furthering the concrete activities which they statically connote, it must be said, however, that, as a matter of simple fact, co-operation is best begotten by co-operation. Men have learned to share large purposes by sharing small purposes, to work together for great achievements by working together on commonplace tasks, to co-operate later in life by growing together in youth.t Where this humble method has t It is this latter fact that has made kinship groups the most ve of equality. Children of the same family 1 a ve! c ual. not because born of the same ts. but because their selves have been produced from the they are thus guided by common ends. It is to this fact likewise that common schools in America have 1 ow owe, their 1 tendencies. So long as the children of different classes that themselves are unequal are thrown gether much of the time in tender years, they find themselves operating in study, in play, in rebellion against a common dis- cipline. In short, they unconsciously grow to be equal, through operative activity. With the passing of genuine mmon schools in America, there passes one force that always . | ln ; ; li¢ } ‘ : ‘ Wt, struck a blow of equality at the most strategic time of life.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 301 not brick by brick raised the splendid temple of equality—as it has not yet, for example, between the negroes and the whites in Amer- ica—no persistence of equalitarian assevera- tion, no warmth of enthusiasm in calling out of magic sesames, has conjured up its walls. For the democracy of man, as well as for the Kingdom of Heaven, a little simple doing of co-operative tasks is more fruitful than any resort to holy names. Vv If, as we have argued, co-operative activ- ity, when actual, has historically categorized itself under the concept “equality’’; and if, as we have further argued, equality, when seen prospectively to be desirable, has justi- fied, and does justify, itself by the extrinsic and intrinsic values of co-operation—then the validity and the limits of human co-op- eration mark the values and the boundaries of a philosophy of equality. Sooner or later, then, the democrat must raise the questions, ““How far is co-operation possible within the human species?” and “How far is it desir- able?’ Only the dogmatic can answer the first question decisively. But the timid mayAMERICAN EQUALITY cather hope from previous advances made by the co-operative impetus. Successive gener- ations since when the memory of man run- neth not to the contrary have been overriding boundaries that preceding generations had deemed to be fixed in the very order of na- ture. Every form of human association has felt the transforming power of this advance the family, the church, the state; art, sci- ence, sport, war. Property barriers, racial | barriers, cultural barriers, religious barriers, sex barriers, have all before this intrepid ad- vancer here and there, now and then, made themselves thin air into which they vanished. | The optimistic will almost certainly see noth- ing in the history of the race to justify the be- lief that the end of this process is yet in sight. Moreover, with the passing of fixed selves and fixed species and a fixed order of nature, the belief grows that education has even more transforming power than the most en- thusiastic claims of the past have made for it. Not enough of the biologically deter- mined has yet been discovered and vouched for in human nature to daunt the growing faith that institutions may make of plastic organisms almost, if not quite, what theyFUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 303 will. And the faith in control grows into deeper conviction when the psychological personality is in debate. For if “the self’’ is, as we have argued, a social construct (by means of the vocal gesture, itself a social mechanism), then thespiritual determinism of human nature through social foresight has no limits yetin view. And sinceco-operation for man, the intelligent animal is primarily a mat- ter of sharing of ends, i.e., a mutual foresight of common consequences, there is good scien- tific reason for believing that the limits of co- operation have not yet been glimpsed. This is a human faith that no disillusion seems able to dim. Schisms in spiritual bodies lead to two churches rather than to none. The road from the divorce court leads by the of- fice where marriage licenses are issued. And out of the débris of a universal holocaust there rises as on the wings of magic morning the dream of a League of Nations that will spell the end of war, even as out of its dead ashes rose the phoenix to a new life, perenni- ally renewed. Out of the defeat of this dream rise disarmament conferences and projected associations of nations which, though they too wither before the bud turns to fruit, are304 AMERICAN EQUALITY followed by other plans clothed out of the habiliments of human hopes, and they in turn by others—on to the end of the unend- ing process. If a man cannot live with other men, he certainly cannot live without them; and the extent to which this dilemma of man, the unsocial social animal, can be re- solved is as yet not fully disclosed. 3ut the enormous possibilities of its pro- gressive resolution gives point to our second eee n. We may summarize our discussion thus far by stating this question in three ways. The first 1s, “How far iS co-ope! ration desirz ble?’ ity, ie ideal, rather than in terms of co-op- Then to put it in terms of equal- erativeactivity, thejustifying function, “How far is it desirable to make men equi alr” On to put it more c ncretely still, “To what ex- tent is it desirable to give men equ ial op} s tunities and equal portions of good Not even the democrat can answer cies question dogmatically. Only the person who knows exactly what sort of society he would prefer and who is wise enough to know what ends will be produced by any given social means can speak with authority here. Wiseacres may rush in where wisdom fears to tread.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION = 305 But certainly most modern students of the social sciences know too much to claim to know that much. The solvent word, if ever to be spoken, must wait upon more knowl- edge both of desirable social ends and effec- tive social means. And in proportion as we are reluctant or unwilling to resort to judi- cious social experimentation, to profit by the wisdom that observed trial and error can sometimes give, to that extent we postpone amelioration by perpetuating our ignorance. To refuse to avail one’s self of the only means of enlightenment presented, is to remain ig- norant for good. And if a people not only refuse themselves to go in, but also hinder those who are going in, to the crucible of social experimentation, then provincial dark- ness is willing to bring on a universal eclipse. The first point, therefore, that trepida- tion may make with regard to the degree of equality that is desirable is that, since no one knows for certain what that degree is and since the only way we have of finding out is by experimentation, bold experimentation both at home and abroad ought to be en- couraged by democrats. Those who do not know, to take a current example, how far in-306 AMERICAN EQUALITY dustrial equality can with profit be carried, and yet who wish to know, cannot possibly regard with other feeling than regret the un- willingness of at least democratic nations to facilitate the experiment that some, if not a majority, of the Russian people have chosen to make. If is of course the same faith that men may find out by experimentation what is unavailable through any other means that has made Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes for a half-century the cynosure of democratic hopes and the judicial philosopher of a new order in America. It is against the tradi- tional view that he has protested, a view well set out by Chief Justice Taft in a recent de- cision,! in which he declared that ““The Con- stitution was intended, its very purpose was, to prevent experimentation with the funda- mental rights of the individual.” Justice Holmes’ protest has sometimes been pointed and polemic, as when in a dissenting opinion in the case just cited he puts his own faith over against that of his presiding colleague. “There is nothing that I deprecate more than the use of the 14th amendment beyond the absolute compulsion of its words to pre- t Truax vs. Corrigan.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 307 vent the making of social experiments that an important part of the community de- sires.” But at other times he clothes his dis- sent in the more general terms of the phi- losopher. When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe in the foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinion that we loathe and believe fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country." But there are two constructive sugges- tions that a democratic faith may make without feeling that it is too far outrunning t Abrams vs. U.S., 250 U.S. 616.308 AMERICAN EQUALITY our available knowledge of what is socially desirable and what are effective means to it. : The first of these suggestions has to do with a psychological matter that may seem ab- struse at first, but which will appear of the most fundamental importance when under- stood. It has to do with man’s so-called ‘conscious life,’ with the ends for which he works and fights. Without parading again the process by which man becomes possessed | of a conscious self, it is enough here to em- phasize that most of human activity is at times teleological. Men work and fight and live for something. If they do not, then some- . thing is wrong, for men under favorable cir- cumstances serve ends.? Now the irreducible minimum of equality that a philosophy can demand and still call itself “democratic” is the sharing by all men up to the level of their ability of the ends for which they must work and fight. Nor must their ability be consid- ered to be justly represented by what it is at any given time, by the status guo, but rather «The best available statement of this human differentia is found in Professor G. W. Cunningham’s The Philosophy of Berg- . son (chap. vi). It hardly need be added, bscribe to all the metaphysical implications there drawn from however, that I do not SUD this characterization.FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION 309 by what it may become under favorable op- portunities. That is, as a fundamental pre- requisite of justice the chance at education must be passed around. Fairness in passing it around will probably be best guaranteed by demanding that the chance be made quantitatively equal, for the simple reason that any prejudgment before actual trial that persons cannot profit equally from the same opportunity lends itself too obviously to prejudice and to unfairness. Nor is this insistence upon sharing ends an abstraction without practical bearing. A reorganization that might not stop short of the radical would attend the effort sin- cerely to apply this principle in industry. The ends of organized industry, to the fur- thering of which the majority of adults must in a capitalistic era devote most of their wak- ing hours, are formed by a few captains of in- dustry, appreciated by a few more, under- stood by a few more, but are either unknown or are dimly enough known to be rebelled against by perhaps the great majority of the world’s workers. This means that the su- preme misfortune that can come to a man in his work—the tragedy of being obliged to310 AMERICAN EQUALITY Pe) work at that which is not intrinsically inter- esting—comes to a majority of industria] workers today; for that cannot be perma- nently of intrinsic interest which is not seen in relation to the human ends it serves.’ Many unskilled, and not a few skilled, work- ers are hardly more than flexible joints to the machines they tend—employed merely because they are a bit more flexible or less expensive than would be joints made of steel. Seeing not the large social ends that are served, the worker, who as a human being 1s also teleologically minded, substitutes for the real end the wage by-product. And then like the daughter of the horseleach that nev- er cries enough, strikes for more and more and more. Employers are of course on the t The degradation involved in spending one’s life in work that porada n involved il | ling he lo S not lik accounts for the add i em! h ISIS of the E nelish y more than wages and decent con- ditions under which to work. The Lounsbury-Herald program in England declares: “Not only must we assure to all workers an in- , 1 | } | ; yme on which a re asonable life can be led: we must also create conditions in which work ceases to be mere drudgery under a rul- ing class, W hether of bureaucrats or of capitalists... . the de- mand of the British democracy is that the mass shall be partners instead of servants, even though as partners their material con- dition is not better than it would be as servants’ (Angell, The British Revolution, pp. 128, 138).FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION jw II whole correct in their belief that if wages are raised, they must be raised again and again. But this is a judgment upon industry rather than a conviction of the workers; for how much mere wage will a man take in exchange for his soul and be fully satisfied with the bargain? Men who are interested in the ends intrinsic to the industrial process and who, having competence guaranteed, would pay to work rather than remain idle, find it diffi- cult to understand why many workers con- tinually complain at both their work and their wage. But the complaint is not thereby made unintelligible. Not all work, to be sure, is equally interesting even when the ends and the means are brought together; but no work is wholly drudgery if seen in its social setting. And there is perhaps no work that would not be drudgery if wholly di- vorced from the social ends it serves. If one *t Speaking from practical experience with a modern industrial situation at its worst, in a state prison, Price P. Disque furnishes an illustration of what such equality is here suggested involves by way of an initial attitude, a disposition to let workers have a share in the ends which they serve. ‘Men always perform better” says he, “when they understand what ts to be done, and how, cach aaihl . agi ove al aces 6] ost aneee when and why. They can act so much m itelligently, and since no manager can foresee all the details, it renders 1t so simple for the subordinates to use the human intelligence, which most of| 312 AMERICAN EQUALITY questions this, let him mention for his own . critical judgment the form of activity that would be pleasant if one were driven to it by a tyrant who never permitted knowledge of the end served and who never spoke of the process except to correct the performance. Not even the fine arts could remain fine through such a test. And while the condi- tions in industry are not as hopeless as the illustration suggests, yet what discerning stu- | dent of the social unrest doubts that its source lies just here—work that can never be adequately compensated for by a wage is compensated for in no other way? Nothing | short of what may fairly be called “citizen- ship in industry” can meet the demand that equality must mean at least a sharing of the | ends of activity. Dewey has hardly over- them possess, when anything slips a cog.’”’ Regarding his proposal the convict-laborers for the installation of such a system as would recognize this simple principle, he continues: “It was an experience of a lifetime to watch the general and gradual change in expression—first confusion, then doubt, then hope, and finally contentment, as far as that expression can be registered upon the or ce V cts’ All 4 c M } pp I29 ‘ « The fuller ethical background and implications of this philos- : } ophy of industry may be found in my The Democratic Way of Life, chap. v, “Democracy and the Day’s Work”’ (University of Chi- cago Pre SS, 1920). ’FUNCTIONAL INTERPRETATION | 313 drawn the picture of present industrial or- ganization, when regarded from the point of view of meaningful equality. An increasingly large portion of economic work is done with machines. As a rule, these machines are not under the personal control of those who operate them. The machines are operated for ends which the worker has ho share in forming and in which as such, or apart from his wage, he has no interest. He neither understands the machines nor cares for their purpose. He is engaged in an activity in which means are cut off from ends, instruments from what they achieve. Highly mechanized activity tends, as Emerson said, to turn men into spiders and needles. But if men understand what they are about, if they see the whole, then the mechanizing effect is counterbal- anced. But when a man is only a tender of a machine, he can have no insight and no affection; creative ac- tivity is out of the question.? The age-old tragic dilemma of finding an achieved goal transformed into a kind of doom has thus been re-enacted in modern industry: the machinery that was to free man, enslaved him. It gave him leisure but furnished him, in the bargain—thanks to its unrelieved monotony—a machine-made per- * Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, pp. 143-44.314 AMERICAN EQUALITY sonality that could use leisure only in fur- ther abuse of his once potential self. But the indictment rests not against industry alone. Dogmas in religion took the place of machines in industry; man achieved a cer- tain growth only to find that, while some growth was counted to him for righteous- ] ness, to outgrow that growth was mortal sin. In no department of feat interest have men more consistently been denied a genuine part in the forming and transforming of the ideals by which and for which they live than in the field of religion. And here leaders and led alike have succumbed to the conceptual 3 < «fF. cI. 106. 200, 266 tre: , 276 ff In, 36 ff., $1, 106, 200, 265, 292 Evolu 220 ff., 252 | . _ +4 * Q ry men + rn > ~ AO Declaration of Sentiments, 89, Experimentation, 305 ff., 324 Deism, 17, 18, 204 ff. Facuet, E., 18 n., 134 ; Democracy, 275 ft. Federal Constitution, 35 ff., 46, — —/ a =< = oO s 7 — ’ i I t+ =e) Disque, Price, 311 n. Galileo, 179, 180 n. Dodd, W. E., x, 135 Garrison, W. L.: for feminism, Lii-’. ; “ ; lar ‘ mwmnhrev FF | liot. Cc W.. 140 f.. IekY- 281 Gilbert, Sir Hum nrey, 282 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 298, ; Emer R. W., 41, 209-1 aoe 28e Gu ociall lL, 222 Equality: of the Declaration of Independence, 11: early bases Hamilton, Alexander, 48 n. of, 1 ff.;in economics, 316 ff.; | Hamilton, Gail, 109 ff. Se ee ek en pe Hammond, Governor J. H Hardy, Thomas, 138 Fr Harris, W. T., 208 ff. lage, 297-99; moral equiva- Hart, A. Bushnell, 1cINDEX Higginson, T. W., 89 ff., 104, 110 ff. Hobbes, Thomas, 16, 20 ff. Hobbhouse, L. T., 253 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 306-7 Hoover, Herbert, 150 Houghton, Alanson B., 315 n. Human nature, 190 Hutchinson, Anne, 94 Huxley, Thomas, 139, 157 Idealism, 207 ff. Ideals, vii Ideation, 235 ff., 250 Individualism, 227 ff., 270 ff. Industrial Revolution, 278-79, 295-96 Inequality, 14 Infancy, 283 ff. Inge, Dean, 135 Ingersoll, Robert, 160 Instincts, 180 ff. International Fournal of Ethics, x Jacobi, Dr. Mary, 89 n., 125 James, William, 174 ff., 206, 259 ff. Jay, John, 48 n. Jefferson, Thomas, 30 ff., 44 ff. Fournal of Speculative Philoso- phy, 208 ff., 213 ff. Justice, 146 ff., 275 337 Kant, Immanuel, 162 ff., 208 Keller, Helen, 243, 244 Kelly, Edmond, 140 King, W. I., 257 n., 317, 319 Kipling, Rudyard, 290 n. Klyce, Skudder, 267 153, 159, Labor, 195, 297 Lee, Ann, 94 Leiber, Francis, 162 Leibnitz, 132, 217 ff. Leisler usurpation, 39 Leuba, J. H., 258 n. Lincoln, Abraham, 56 ff., 150 Locke, John, 15 n., 20 ff., 134, 172 Locke, John G., 245 n. Lowell, A. L., 130 ff., 136 MacCunn, C. T., 141 n. McIntosh, Maria J., 92-93 n. Maine, Sir Henry, 21 n., 29 n., 134 Mathews, Shailer, 18 n., 187 n., 278 ff. Mayflower compact, 29 Mead, George H., x, 240, 241, 244, 245 Mental measurement, 183 ff. Meredith, H. O., 297 Merriam, C. E., x, 13, 36, 56 n., 132 n., 136 Methodists, 96 Mill, J. S., 170AMERICAN EQUALITY 1] ~* . . Montesquieu, 61, 134, 154 Riley, Woodbridge, 17, 41 n., R ] o 25 Nat Bureau of | CoS { : | h. B 4 £2 New England, 14 Sanctions: {ol ae South, 25 OldINDEX Spencer, Anna G., 115 ff., 123, 236 Spencer, H., 228, 239 Spinoza, 132 Stanton, Elizabeth, 99 State of nature, 23 ff. Stephen, Sir James, 134 Stephens, Alexander H., 71 ff. Stiles, Ezra, 205 ff. Tandy, Jeanette R., 65 n. Tawney, R. H., 322 n. Time, 276 ff. Tufts, J. H., x, 154, 188, 249, 286 n., 288, 317 n., 324 n. Turner, Frederick, 4, 15 n. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 65 n., 294 Unitarianism, 160 Universalists, 261 n. Universals, 267 Utilitarianism, 153, 166 ff. Verbal gesture, 242 ff. Virginia, 13 Virginia Declaration of Rights, In. 339 Weeden, W. B., 4, 14.n., 60 n. Wendell, Barret, 154 West, disturbing factor, 41, 43 Whitman, Walt, 280-81 Williams, Roger, 198 ff. Wilson, Woodrow, 150, 321-22 Winthrop, John, 9 n. Wolfe, A. B., x Woods, Arthur, 286 Woolsey, T. D., 163 Wright, Ben F., x Wright, Frances, 94 Wright, Martha C., 99 Woman suffrage: and the church, 99 ff.; and history of, 83 ff.; and nature as norm, 102 ff.; and the professions, 121 ff.; for self-development, 123 ff.; for self-protection, 117 ff.; for social effective- ness, 119 ff.; utility of, 116 ff. Yerkes, Robert M., 184 ff. Yoakum, C. S., 185 n. Zimmern, Alfred, 282 PRINTED IN US'‘APLEASE RETURN TO ALDERMAN LIBRARYBOOKS ARE LENT FOR TWO WEEKS Fine of 10c for each Day after the Date CX 000 a7a Bfo