There is nothing surprising, perhaps nothing deeply condemnable, in the burning anger for which this acquiescence is often changed in the more impatient natures. As against the ignoble host who think that the present ordering of men, with all its prodigious inequalities, is in foundation and substance the perfection of social blessedness, Rousseau was almost in the right. If the only alternative to the present social order remaining in perpetuity were a retrogression to some such condition as that of the islanders of the South Sea, a lover of his fellow-creatures might look upon the result, so far as it affected the happiness of the bulk of them, with tolerably complete indifference. It is only the faith that we are moving slowly away from the existing order, as our ancestors moved slowly away from the old want of order, that makes the present endurable, and makes any tenacious effort to raise the future possible. * * * * * An immense quantity of nonsense has been talked about the equality of man, for which those who deny that doctrine and those who assert it may divide the responsibility. It is in reality true or false, according to the doctrines with which it is confronted. As against the theory that the existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and delights of the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of natural inequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary theory is true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of external chance most righteous and unanswerable. But the issues do not end here. Take such propositions as these:--there are differences in the capacity of men for serving the community; the well-being of the community demands the allotment of high function in proportion to high faculty; the rights of man in politics are confined to a right of the same protection for his own interests as is given to the interests of others. As against these principles, the revolutionary deductions from the equality of man are false. And such pretensions as that every man could be made equally fit for every function, or that not only each should have an equal chance, but that he who uses his chance well and sociably should be kept on a level in common opinion and trust with him who uses it ill and unsociably, or does not use it at all,--the whole of this is obviously most illusory and most disastrous, and in whatever decree any set of men have ever taken it up, to that degree they have paid the penalty.