Now equality is not the same thing as liberty. I do not, indeed, agree with Lord Acton’s famous dictum that the ‘passion for equality makes vain the hope of freedom’;[1] liberty and equality are not so much antithetic as complementary. Men might be broadly equal under a despotism, and yet unfree. But it is, I think, historically true that in the absence of certain equalities no freedom can ever hope for realization. The acute mind of Aristotle long ago saw that the craving for equality is one of the most profound roots of revolution. The reason is clear enough. The absence of equality means special privilege for some and not for others, a special privilege which is not, so to say, in nature but in a deliberate contrivance of the social environment. Men like Harrington and Madison and Marx all insisted, and with truth, that whatever the forms of state, political power will, in fact, belong to the owners of economic power. We need not argue that our happiness depends upon the possession of political power; we can argue that exclusion from it is likely to mean exclusion from that which largely determines the contours of happiness. And it follows that the more equal are the social rights of citizens, the more likely they are to be able to utilize their freedom in realms worthy of exploration. Certainly the history of the abolition of special privilege has been, also, the history of the expansion of what in our inheritance was open to the common man. The more equality there is in a State, the more use, in general, we can make of our freedom.