m men being born equal, some are
born with the capacity of becoming Shakespeares and Newtons, and others
with scarcely the power of rising above Sally the chimpanzee. The
answer would be conclusive, if anybody demanded that we should all be
just six feet high, with brains weighing sixty ounces, neither more nor
less. It is also true, and, I conceive, more relevant, that, as the man
of science will again say, all improvement has come through little
groups of men superior to their neighbours, through races or through
classes, which, by elevating themselves on the shoulders of others,
have gained leisure and means for superior cultivation. But equality
may be demanded as facilitating this process, by removing the
artificial advantages of wealth. It may be taken as a demand for a fair
start, not as a demand that the prizes shall be distributed
irrespectively of individual worth. And, whether the demand is rightly
or wrongly expressed, we must, I think, admit that the real force with
which we have to reckon is the demand for justice and for equality as
somehow implied by justice. It is easy to browbeat a poor man who wants
bread and cheese for himself and his family, by calling his demands
materialistic, and advising him to turn his mind to the future state,
where he will have the best of Dives. It is equally easy to ascribe the
demands to mere envy and selfishness, or to those evil-minded agitators
who, for their own wicked purposes, induce men to prefer a guinea to a
pound of wages. But, after all, there is something in the demand for
fair play and for the means of leading decent lives, which requires a
better answer. It is easy, again, to say that all Socialists are
Utopian. Make every man equal to-day, and the old inequalities will
reappear to-morrow. Pitch such a one over London Bridge, it was said,
with nothing on but his breeches, and he will turn up at Woolwich with
his pockets full of gold. It is as idle to try for a dead level, when
you work with such heterogeneous materials, as to persuade a
homogeneous fluid to stand at anything but a dead level. But surely it
may be urged that this is as much a reason for declining to believe
that equal conditions of life will produce mere monotony, as for
insisting that equality in any state is impossible. The present system
includes a plan for keeping the scum at the surface. One of the few
lessons which I have learnt from life, and not found already in
copy-books, is the enorm