quality of the two wills and in the degree of intelligence
accompanying it justifies an inequality which may go as far as
subjection. Why should we seek further since Herr Duehring has brought
his own edifice of equality which he so laboriously constructed
tumbling to the ground?

But if we are now prepared to meet Herr Duehring's silly and
incompetent consideration of equality of rights we are not yet ready
to take issue with the idea itself which through the influence of
Rousseau has played a theatrical part, and since the days of the great
Revolution a practical and political part, and now plays no
insignificant role in the agitation carried on by the socialist
movement of all countries. The establishment of its scientific
soundness has a value for the proletarian agitation.

The idea that all men have something in common as men and that they
are equal with respect to that common quality is naturally older than
history. But the modern doctrine of equality is something quite
different than that. This derives from the property of humanity,
common to man, the equality of man, as man, or at least of all
citizens of a given state or of all members of a given society. Until
the conclusion of equality of rights in the state and society was
deduced from the original notion of relative equality, and until this
conclusion was to be stated as something natural and self evident,
many thousands of years had to pass and indeed have passed. In the
oldest and most elementary communities it may be said that equality of
rights among the members existed in the highest degree, women, slaves,
and foreigners, however, being excluded. Among the Greeks and Romans
inequality existed to a greater degree. Greeks and barbarians, freemen
and slaves, citizens and subjects, Roman citizens and Roman subjects
(to employ a comprehensive expression) that these should have any
claim to equality of political rights would have been regarded by the
ancients necessarily as madness. Under the Roman Empire there was a
complete elimination of all these distinctions with the exception of
those of freemen and slaves. There arose therefore as far as the
freemen were concerned that equality of private individuals upon which
Roman law was founded and developed as the most perfect system of
jurisprudence based on private property with which we are acquainted.
But while the contradiction of freemen and slaves existed there could
be no statement based upon the un