EQUALITY AND LIBERTY.
It was as a privileged order that the Nobility of France principally
excited the ill-will of the common people. The more thoughtful Frenchmen
of the eighteenth century, all of them at least who have come to be
known by the name of Philosophers, set before themselves two great
ideals. These were equality and liberty. The aspiration after these was
accompanied in their minds by contempt for the past and its lessons,
misunderstanding of the benefits which former ages had bequeathed to
them, and hatred of the wrongs and abuses which had come down from
earlier times. Among them the word gothic was a violent term of
reproach, aimed indiscriminately at buildings, laws, and customs.
History, with the exception of that of Sparta, was thought to consist
far more of warnings than of models. Just before the Revolution, a
number of persons who had met in a lady's parlor were discussing the
education of the Dauphin. "I think," said Lafayette," that he would do
well to begin his History of France with the year 1787."
This tendency to depreciate the past was due in a measure to the
preference, natural to lively minds, for deductive over inductive
methods of thought. It is so much easier and pleasanter to assume a few
plausible general principles and meditate upon them, than to amass and
compare endless series of dry facts, that not by long chastening will
the greater part of the world be brought to the more arduous method. Nor
should enthusiasm for one of the great processes of thought cause
contempt of the other. Even the great inductive French philosopher of
the eighteenth century, Montesquieu, failed in a measure to grasp the
continuity of history; and drew the facts for his study rather from
China and from England than from France, rather from the Roman republic
than the existing monarchy. Fear of the censor and of the civil and
ecclesiastical tribunals, which would not bear the open discussion of
questions of present interest, doubtless added to this tendency.
The idea of equality at first seems simple, but equality may be of many
kinds. Absolute equality in all respects between two human beings, no
one has ever seen, and no one perhaps has ever thought of desiring. All
the relations of life are founded on inequality. By their differences
husband and wife, friend and friend, are made necessary and endeared to
each other; the parent protects and serves the child, the child obeys
and helps the parent; the citizen calls on the magistrate to guard his
rights, the magistrate enforces the laws which have their sanction in
the consent of the body of citizens. Equality as a political ideal is
therefore a limited equality. It may extend to condition, it may be
confined to civil rights, or to opportunities.
The Philosophers of the eighteenth century, followed by a school in our
day, universally assumed that an approximate equality of condition was
desirable. Rousseau agreed with Montesquieu, in believing that a small
republic, none of whose citizens were either very rich or very poor, was
likely to be in a desirable condition. Virtue, they thought, would be
its especial characteristic. In some of the Swiss cantons, and later in
the struggling American colonies of Great Britain, Frenchmen discovered
communities approaching their ideal in respect to the equal distribution
of wealth; and their discovery in the latter case was not without great
results. This kind of equality has since passed away from large portions
of America, as it must always disappear where civilization increases.
Good people mourn its departure; some few, perhaps, would patiently
endure its return. They are about as numerous as those who abandon city
life to dwell permanently in the country, also the home of comparative
equality of condition. The theoretic admiration for this sort of
equality was shared by a large and enlightened part of the French
nobility. Thus the order was weakened by the fact that many of its own
members did not believe in its claims.
Another kind of equality is that of civil rights. Before the Revolution,
France was ruled by law, but all Frenchmen were not ruled by the same
law. There were privileged persons and privileged localities. Of these
anomalies, sometimes working hardship, the minds of intelligent men at
that time were especially impatient. They believed, as has been said, in
natural laws, implanted in every breast, finding their expression in
every conscience; and many of them entertained a crude notion that such
laws could easily be applied to the enormously complicated facts of
actual life. Assuming such laws to exist, as absolute as mathematical
axioms and far easier of application, all variation was error, all
anomaly absurd, all claims of a privileged class unfair and unfounded.
Equality of civil rights is also desired from the fear of oppression; a
very important motive in the eighteenth century, when the great still
had the power to be very oppressive at times. We have seen the treatment
which Voltaire received at the hands of a member of one of the great
families. Outrages still more flagrant appear to have been not uncommon
in the reign of Louis XV., and although there had probably never been a
time in France so free from them as that of his successor, their memory
was still fresh. It is in their decrepitude that political abuses are
most ferociously attacked. When young and lusty they are formidable.
Again, there is equality of opportunity. This is desired as a means of
subverting equality of condition to our own advantage, as a chance to be
more than equal to our fellow-men. This kind is longed for by the able
and ambitious. Where it is denied, the strongest good men will be less
useful to the state, unless they happen to be favorably placed at birth;
the strongest bad men perhaps more dangerous, because more discontented.
It is this sort of equality, more than any other, which the French
Philosophers and their followers actually secured for Frenchmen, and in
a less degree for other Europeans of to-day. By their efforts, the
chance of the poor but talented child to rise to power and wealth has
been somewhat increased. This chance, when they began their labors, was
not so hopeless as it is often represented. It is not now so great as it
is sometimes assumed to be. Still, there has been one decided advance.
We have seen that under the old monarchy many important places were
reserved for members of the noble class, and practically for a few
families among them. Since that monarchy passed away, the opportunity to
serve the state, with the great prizes which public life offers to the
strong and the aspiring, has been thrown open, theoretically at least,
to all Frenchmen.
If the idea of equality be comparatively simple, that of liberty is very
much the reverse. The word, in its general sense, signifies little more
than the absence of external control. In politics it is used, in the
first place, for the absence of foreign conquest, and in this sense a
country may be called free although it is governed by a despot. The next
signification of liberty is political right, and this is the sense in
which it has been most used until recent years. When a tyrant overthrew
the liberties of a Greek city, he substituted his own personal rule for
the rights of an oligarchy. The mass of the inhabitants may have been
neither better nor worse off than before. When Hampden resisted the
encroachments of King Charles I, he was fighting the battle of the upper
and middle classes against despotism, and we hold him one of the
principal champions of liberty. Indeed, liberty in this sense is so far
from being identical with equality, that many of those who have been
foremost in its defense have been members of aristocracies and holders
of slaves. To accuse them of inconsistency is to be misled by the
ambiguous meaning of a word. They fought for rights which they believed
to be their own; they denied that the rights of all men were identical.
During the eighteenth century in France, certain bodies, such as the
clergy and the Parliament of Paris, were struggling for political
liberties in this older sense, and before the outbreak of the French
Revolution many of the most enlightened of the nobility hoped to acquire
such liberties. Much blood and confusion might have been spared, and
many useful reforms accomplished, had Frenchmen clutched less wildly at
the phantom of equality, and sought the safer goal of political liberty.
Another sort of liberty, although it has undoubtedly been desired by
individuals in all ages, is almost entirely modern as an ideal for
civilized communities. This is the absence of interference, not only of
a foreign power or of a lawless oppressor, but of the very law itself.
The desire for such freedom as this, would in almost all ages of the
world have been held inconsistent with proper respect for order and
security. It would have been considered no more than the wicked longing
of an unchastened spirit, the temptation of the Evil One himself. In the
eighteenth century, however, we see the rise of new opinions. It may be
that order had become so firmly established in the European world that a
reaction could safely set in. At any rate we find a new way of looking
at things. "Independence," a word which had been often used by the
clerical party, and always as a term of reproach, is treated by the
Philosophers with favor. Toleration of all kinds of opinions, and of
most kinds of spoken words, is making way.[Footnote: In spite of the
impatience shown by Voltaire of any criticism of himself, he and his
followers did more than any other men that ever lived to make criticism
free to all writers.] A new school of thinkers is adapting the new form
of thought to economical matters. _Laissez faire; laissez passer_.
Restrict the functions of government. Order will arise from the average
of contending interests; right direction is produced by the sum of
conflicting forces. The doctrine has exerted enormous influence since
the French Revolution in resisting the claims of socialism,--that new
form of tyranny in which all are to be the despot and each the slave.
But few of the Philosophers accepted it entirely. Most of them desired
the constant interference of the government for one purpose or another,
and many believed in the power, almost the omnipotence, of a mythical
personage, borrowed in part from Plutarch and commonly called the
Legislator.
The history and action of this personage may be roughly stated as
follows. Every nation now civilized was in early days in a barbarous
condition. Once upon a time, a great man came from somewhere, and
brought a complete set of laws, morals, and manners with him. To these
laws and customs he generally ascribed a divine origin. The nation to
which they were proclaimed adopted them, and the people's subsequent
happiness and prosperity were in proportion to their excellence. The
reasons which are supposed to have induced the barbarous tribe to change
all its habits at the bidding of one man are seldom given, or if given,
are ludicrously inadequate. The theory of the legislator is now out of
date. It is generally held that the institutions of every race have
grown up with it, that they are appropriate to its nature and history,
gradually modified sometimes by act of the national will, and more or
less changed under foreign influences, but that their general character
cannot suddenly be subverted. Its institutions thus as truly belong to a
civilized race, as the skin without fur or the erect position belong to
mankind. There is some evidence in support of either theory, and the
truth will probably be found to lie between them, although nearer to the
latter. Yet the effect of a higher civilization implanted on a lower one
seems at times singularly rapid. The story of the legislator is a part
of most early histories and mythologies. The classical model has
generally been held to be either Minos or Lycurgus. There were few
clever men in France between the years 1740 and 1790 who did not dream
of trying on the sandals of those worthies.
While the ideas attached to equality and to liberty were vague and
indefinite, it was generally assumed that they would coincide. Liberty
and equality, however, have tendencies naturally opposed to each other.
Remove the exterior forces which control the wills of men, overturn
foreign domination, give every citizen political rights, reduce the
interference of laws to a minimum, and the natural differences and
inequalities of physical, mental, and moral strength, or power of will,
inherent in mankind, will have the fuller opportunity to act. The strong
improve their natural advantage, they acquire dominion over their weaker
neighbors, they monopolize opportunities for themselves, their friends
and their children. Only by keeping all men in strict subjection to
something outside of themselves can all be kept in comparative equality.
This fact was instinctively apprehended by one school of French
thinkers. We shall see that the followers of Rousseau, while posing as
champions of Liberty, were in fact the founders of a system which is the
very antithesis of individual freedom.[Footnote: It is perhaps needless
to remark that I have touched here only on the political meanings of the
word Liberty. In the eighteenth century the word was much used in its
philosophical sense, and the eternal problem of necessity and free-will
was warmly discussed.]