this equalitarian ideal could be embodied in a
social program it had to await the coming of the modern age with its
open doors, its freer movements of thought and life, its belief in
progress, its machinery of change. But even in the stagnation of the
intervening centuries the old Stoic-Christian ideal never was utterly
forgotten. Lactantius, a Christian writer of the fourth century, said
that God, who creates and inspires men, "willed that all should be
equal." [3] Gregory the Great, at the end of the sixth century, said
that "By nature we are all equal." [4] For ages this spiritual insight
remained dissociated from any social program, but now the inevitable
connection has been made. Old caste systems and chattel slavery have
gone down before this ideal. Aristotle argued that slavery ethically
was right because men were essentially and unchangeably masters or
slaves by nature. Somehow that would not sound plausible to us, even
though the greatest mind of all antiquity did say it. Whatever may be
the differences between men and races, they are not sufficient to
justify the ownership of one man by another. The ideal of equality has
wrecked old aristocracies that seemed to have firm hold on permanence.
If one would feel again the thrill which men felt when first the old
distinctions lost their power, one should read once more the songs of
Robert Burns. They often seem commonplaces to us now, but they were
not commonplaces then:

"For a' that and a' that,
Their dignities, and a' that;
The pith o' sense and pride o' worth
Are higher rank than a' that!"

This ideal has made equality before the law one of the maxims of our
civilized governments, failure in which wakens our apprehension and our
fear; it has made equal suffrage a fact, although practical people only
yesterday laughed at it as a dream; it has made equality in opportunity
for an education the underlying postulate of our public school systems,
although in New York State seventy-five years ago the debate was still
acute as to whether such a dream ever could come true; it is to-day
lifting races, long accounted inferior, to an eminence where
increasingly their equality is acknowledged. One with difficulty
restrains his scorn for the intellectual impotence of so-called wise
men who think all idealists mere dreamers. Who is the dreamer--the
despiser or the upholder of an ideal whose upheavals already have burst
through old caste systems, upset o