ility from taxation, and the superiority which
attached to a certain status. And as men no longer lived in a world
empire like the Roman, but in an independent system with states which
approximated to a similar degree of bourgeois development and which
had intercourse with one another on an equal footing, the demand took
on necessarily a universal character reaching beyond the individual
state, and freedom and equality were thus proclaimed as human rights.
But as regards the special bourgeois character of these human rights,
it is significant that the American Constitution which was the first
to recognise these rights of man in the same breath established
slavery among the colored people: class privileges were cursed, race
privileges were blessed.

As is well known, the bourgeois class as soon as it escaped from the
domination of the ruling class in the cities, by which process the
medieval stage passes into the modern, has been steadily and
inevitably dogged by a shadow, the proletariat. So also the bourgeois
demands for equality are accompanied by the proletarian demands for
equality. Directly the demand for the abolition of class privileges
was made by the bourgeois there succeeded the proletarian demand for
the abolition of classes themselves. This was first made in a
religious form and was based upon early Christianity, but later
derived its support from the bourgeois theories of equality. The
proletarians take the bourgeois at their word, they demand the
realisation of equality not merely apparently, not merely in the
sphere of government but actually in the sphere of society and
economics. Since the French bourgeoisie of the great Revolution placed
equality in the foreground of their movement, the French proletariat
has answered it blow for blow with the demand for social and economic
equality, and equality has become the special battle cry of the French
proletariat.

The demand for equality as made by the proletariat has a double
significance. Either it is, as was particularly the case at first, in
the Peasants' War, for example, a natural reaction against social
inequalities which were obvious, against the contrast between rich and
poor, masters and slaves, luxurious and hungry, and as such it is
simply an expression of revolutionary instinct finding its
justification in that fact and in that fact alone. On the other hand
it may arise from reaction against the bourgeois claims of equality
from which it deduc