The doctrine that "all men are created equal," or that they ought to be equal, we shall describe for convenience as the democratic doctrine. It first came to general attention through Christianity, which proclaimed the brotherhood of all mankind in a common fatherhood of God. But even as taught by the Christians, the doctrine had startling limitations. It was several centuries before a church council summoned the courage to decide that women were human beings, and had souls; and today many devout Christians are still uncertain whether Japanese and Chinese and Filipinos and Negroes are human beings, and have souls. I have heard old gentlemen in the South gravely maintain that the Negro is not a human being at all, but a different species of animal. I have heard learned men in the South set forth that the sutures in the Negro skull close at some very early age, and thus make moral responsibility impossible for the black race. And you will find the same ideas maintained, not merely as to differences of race and color, but as to differences of economic condition. You will find the average aristocratic Englishman quite convinced that the "lower orders" are permanently inferior to himself, and this though they are of the same Anglo-Saxon stock. For convenience I will refer to the doctrine that there is some natural and irremovable inferiority of certain races or classes, as the aristocratic doctrine. I will probably startle some of my readers by making the admission that if there is any such natural or irremovable inferiority, then a belief in political or economic equality is a blunder. If there are certain classes or races which cannot think, or cannot learn to think as well as other classes and races, those mentally inferior classes and races will obey, and they will be made to obey, and neither you nor I, nor all the preachers and agitators in the world, will ever be able to arrange it otherwise. Suppose we could do it, we should be committing a crime against life; we should be holding down the race and aborting its best development.