est of all human institutions, and to know the end which it actually serves would be to know, not only the end of the Organic Will, but also the individual ends of all the units subsumed under it. On the other hand, to know the ideal end of the State would be to know the end of life itself. The State is an earthly absolute. A formulated end for it is arrived at a priori, and has only a subjective validity. It is neither the end which the State does actually serve, nor yet the ideal end toward which the State, like every progressive human institution, is gradually advancing. It is only the conscious end, and as such contains less than either the actual or the ideal ends. The conscious end of the State is not a fixed or abiding one. It is only an end for the individuals holding it. If they are sufficiently numerous they may constitute that public opinion which is in the last resort the sovereignty of the State. Those aims which they regard as the end of the State will become such an end, and the State will endeavor to attain them, for it exists to perform those functions which public opinion, for the time being, demands of it. The realization of public opinion for the time being is the only conscious end of the State.

There is thus no possibility of reaching any fixed limit for State activity, either from the side of the individual by a doctrine of natural right, or from the side of the State by establishing for it a fixed and permanent end or purpose. Indeed, even if an abiding end for the State were conceded as known, it would be useless. Just as natural right tells merely what is, and never what ought to be, so too with the end of the State. Whatever end is adopted is comparatively unimportant; the means, direct and indirect, by which that end is to be attained, are the important consideration. Granted even the narrowest end, bare security, and in the closely interwoven web of social life, there is almost no act which cannot be interpreted as bearing upon that end. Public education, sanitary legislation, prohibition, moral legislation of all kinds, the grossest violations of "personal liberty," of freedom of thought, of freedom of speech, can be as readily defended from the

standpoint of mere security for life and property as from the position of the most advanced socialistic conception of the functions of the State.

The conflict is internal and irreconcilable; liberty, in the truest and highest sense, can only be realized in a régime of law; but law in its very nature involves restraint, and the absence of that spontaneity which is the essence of free personality. At the same time all attempts to determine "spheres" of action for individuals, i.e., to divide life for them. into separate departments, a department in which law must prevail and another in which liberty ought to be permitted, are useless. No such spheres can be deduced, either from the study of the nature of the individual, or from that of the constitution and purposes of the State.

CHAPTER IV.

THERE is no natural equality among men. It ought not to be necessary to say much in support of this proposition. The theory of the social contract is not more dead than is the doctrine of natural equality upon which it rested. Men are not now, and never have been, equal. Indeed, absolute equality is an impossibility. There is no equality in nature. For two things to be absolutely equal, equal in all their parts, qualities, and relations, would be for them to be identical. Nature knows nothing of equality. No two stones, no two plants, no two animals, are ever exactly equal, and so it is with men. Men differ from one another in all their powers and capacities, both actual and potential; they differ not only in the developed stages of their being, when moulded and formed by education and environment; they differ also in the earliest period of existence. Even if inequalities were originally produced by artificial causes, the law of heredity operates powerfully to perpetuate them, and of that law the new-born babe is either the beneficiary or the victim. Disparities exist among the tiniest infants; they are unlike in their inherited powers and tendencies, physical, intellectual, and moral; their subsequent characters are not the result of individual experience alone, but are also largely the result of a race experience bequeathed by forgotten ancestors. Childhood's inequalities are at least as great as those of maturer years, extending, as they do, all the way from the precocious premature genius to the unfortunate idiot ; and from these inequalities grow naturally most of the differences of later life. Nor are children even politically equal. They are not, as Professor Huxley imagines, political zeros.1

166 Surely it must be a joke, and rather a cynical one, too, to talk of the political status of a new-born child.”— T. H. Huxley, On the Natural Inequality of Men. Nineteenth Century, vol. XXVII, p. 9.

The infant is a personality, recognized by law, possessed of a status varying according to the status of its parents, and of rights which courts of justice will protect; even the infant en ventre de sa mère is a definite legal personality; the needless destruction of its life is a crime; while, for certain purposes of the law, it is capable of acquiring and holding property.

Great as are the disparities between individuals, as great, and for social philosophy as important, are the differences which exist in their relations one to another. Some of these differences are the direct outcome of their natural inequalities, thus, in every group of men will be found one who, either by force of will or powers of persuasion, is the natural leader and commander of his fellows. Other relations involving inequalities, such as the relations of male and female, parent and child, old and young, are part of the order of nature and as such are necessary and independent of any social institutions. No law can make the young man of twenty equal to the man of sixty in worldly experience. No legislation can give to men the sensitiveness and emotional characteristics of women, or confer upon women the physical strength, courage, and endurance of

men.

Inequalities must necessarily exist. They are not produced by the artificial conditions of life. They are facts of nature and belong to the very constitution of things. But it does not follow, on that account, that all existing inequalities are alike necessary, or that it is wise and good that natural inequalities should be allowed to work themselves out to all their legitimate conclusions. Society, the combination of men for mutual strength and benefit, is called into being for the very purpose of turning the course of nature, of making it subservient to the wants of men, of overcoming its force in one direction, by an intelligent application of its other forces in another direction. Besides this many inequalities are the result of human action, of habit and convention, and as such are entirely within the control of men and may be consciously modified by them. Because absolute equality is an impossibility, it does not

therefore follow that an approximate equality is either impossible or unwise. To what extent is society or the State endeavoring to attain such an equality?

The term equality, as used by social philosophy, is an extremely indefinite one; it may mean almost anything or nothing. It implies a comparison of two or more objects, and the relation which it expresses may consist in (1) a constant proportion between them, an equality of inequalities (2) the absence of all differences, an absolute equality, and (3) the absence of difference in respect to some particular quality. In the second of these meanings equality between men is an impossibility only demanded by an occasional fanatic in times of social disturbance. In the first it has been generally conceded to be an essential element of Justice, since first enunciated by Plato and Aristotle. That the rights of men should be in proportion to their qualities and merits, that equals should be equal, and that unequal men should remain unequal, is a position rarely questioned as an abstract proposition. But it may well be asked, of what use is it? What is its practical value? Differences existing by nature will still exist and will continue to operate despite all social institutions. Social action cannot eliminate them. Human industry can make the temperate zone as habitable as the torrid, but it is not by destroying their differences; it cannot give to the tropics the bracing energetic life of the north, or to the north the luxuriant vegetation of the south. Social action cannot eliminate the differences of men, but it can reduce their scope and lessen their effects. As a matter of fact, society has by its interference, so modified the natural differences of men, that it would puzzle the wisest to determine, exactly, how far existing inequalities are the results of natural inequalities and how far the artificial products of social convention. Until such a determination can be reached and a standard of value obtained, the mathematical proportion of Aristotle must remain a probably true ideal without any practical value.