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.