Since 1789, society, as a matter of course, has continued to move in the same grooves, and, thanks to work and competition, all that which still existed by way of social inequalities has gradually disappeared; if, by chance, there still remain in our laws such vestiges of former inequality, they will in time, and with the help of all enlightened men, disappear; for it is now a truth fully recognized that the good of humanity demands that at least all legal inequalities should be done away with, and that all men, without distinction, should be allowed to acquire any advantages which their special faculties, and the conditions wherein they are placed, enable them to acquire. I say, then, that this being the case, there is no reason why, in the present state of society, men should any longer be designated by classes. They are men, and men alone, and as such they should be allowed to enjoy common advantages, to live by their work--namely, to constitute themselves into families, to cultivate their intelligence, to worship God according to their conscience--in a word, to enjoy all the rights we call the rights of a man and citizen. But when in a society all legal inequalities have been suppressed, does it necessarily follow that an absolute equality will be the final result? No. Society can only do away with inequalities of its own making; inequalities which, from causes we have not time here to set forth, were added to the already existing natural inequalities. For there are natural inequalities; inequalities which may be called individual inequalities, there being no two persons in the world exactly the same. From this fact alone--men being in a thousand ways different from each other--it necessarily follows that each man's condition is different from that of his fellow-men. Hence an infinite multitude of inequalities which have always existed and always will exist, because they result from the nature of things; and such inequalities must be clearly distinguished from those dependent on the law. What now are the principal causes of these inequalities, which I call individual inequalities? They are of two kinds: the inherent faculties of the individual, and the circumstances wherein he is placed. The faculties of the individual are the work of nature: they spring from his moral and physical organization; and, as I have said above, there being no two men exactly alike, either physically or morally, it naturally follows that there are differences, and these differences bring with them inequalities. Let us, for instance, take the most important of all these differences, namely, physical strength, health. Man is a living being, an organized being, and his organization is subject to the most delicate, most numerous, most complicated conditions. Hence many differences. Some are born strong, robust, able to brave all kinds of temperatures, all sorts of trials--trials of work, of outside events, sometimes the trials of their own excesses even.