Until within a few years past, this dogma was stereotyped in all the text-books of the country--from the horn-book to the most eminent treatise on Moral Science for colleges and universities. From the days of Jefferson until now, it has been the text for the noisy twaddle of the “stump-politician,” and the profound discussions of the grave senator in the Congress of the United States. If this dogma, as it generally exists in thought, be true, it will follow, that any and every abridgment of liberty is a violation of original and natural right--that is, inalienable right. Hence every system of slavery must be based upon a false principle. The popular sense in which this language is generally understood, from father to son, is evidently the literal sense. But taken in this sense, the doctrine is utterly false. For men are born in a state of infancy, and grow up to the state of manhood; and infants are entirely incapable of freedom, and do not enjoy a particle of it. They _are_ not, therefore, born equally free, but in a state of entire subjection. They grow up, it is true--if they be not imbeciles--to a degree of mental liberty, that is, the liberty of arbitrary volition in the plain matters of _right_ and _wrong_, and hence are accountable; but the degree of this liberty, or how far they are thus mentally free, depends upon the accident of birth, education, and numerous coincident circumstances, which destroys all equality of mental freedom; and as to _equality_ in other respects, it is scarcely a decent regard to the feelings of mankind to affirm their equality. They are not _physically_ equal. No two men will compare exactly in this respect. They are not _politically_ equal. The history of all human governments, throughout all time, shows this. To be “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” in unequal and subordinate positions, _to the few_, has been the lot of the great mass of mankind from the days of Adam. But, says the “socialist,” (to whom the doctrine is far more creditable,) “this latter is precisely the state of things we deprecate, and affirm that such was never the intention of Deity, but that it is his will that there should be no such inequality among men; that his will is in itself _the right_; and what it is his will we should be, it is _right_ for us to be, and it is our right _to be_; and that system which makes our condition other than this, deprives us of our rights.” This is the philosophy of socialism.