No, says the objector, but the law is not merely felt when two litigants face each other, or when a criminal is apprehended; it is felt in the home of the just as well as in that of the unjust; it is felt in the life of the city, in the village and in the factory. But it is precisely in such circumstances that the law would be most harsh, if it assumed equality. It is compelled to assume inequality in legislating for large communities, otherwise it could not be just at all. The very symbol of justice--a blindfold female with a pair of scales in one hand--is a mathematical symbol, which can have no relation to human affairs, but only to the mathematical abstraction, weight. “A good law should be good for all men,” said Condorcet, “even as a proposition is true for all men.” “The capital error of the whole French Revolution,” says Louis Madelin, “lies in the dogma thus proclaimed by Condorcet.”[11] Yes, but Condorcet was not a political thinker, he was one of the foremost mathematicians of his time! And Thomas Jefferson, whose words head this chapter, was his disciple. The danger to which the mathematician, like the engineer exposes us, begins when he pretends to apply his principles to human affairs. But, continues the objector, although it is admitted that initial equality, as between human beings, or any living things for that matter, is an impossibility, seeing that nature’s products are all diverse and unequal; and although subsequent equality is hard to achieve without behaving unjustly and barbarously to all those who depart from a certain norm or standard--that is to say, without bleeding, debilitating, truncating, or otherwise injuring all those who vary from an arbitrarily selected pattern--there surely can be such a thing as Equality of Opportunity. At this point in the discussion it is only fair to say that most opponents of Egalitarianism promptly capitulate, and eagerly concede that equality of opportunity is a genuine desideratum capable of practical realisation. At the risk of appearing captious and sophistical, however, it can no more be admitted here that Equality of Opportunity has any actual possibilities of realisation than has the principle of equality itself. It is, in fact, an illusion rather more complex and more serious than the latter. For it presupposes, not only equality among men, but equality of opportunity--two equalities instead of one--and among a class [p68] of things which can be made equal only by a miracle. In the first place, it may be assumed, without any further discussion, that a moment’s calm reflection is enough to dispel even from the meanest intelligence, the illusion that men can ever be equal.