nomads. But among a body of naked, wandering savages, though, there may be no verbally recognized distinctions of rank or office, superior strength and cunning confer authority of a more valid kind than that secured by acts of Parliament; there may be no property in things, but the witless man will be poverty-stricken in ideas, the clever man will be a capitalist in that same commodity, which in the long run buys all other commodities; one will miss opportunities, the others will make them; and, proclaim human equality as loudly as you like, Witless will serve his brother. So long as men are men and society is society, human equality will be a dream; and the assumption that it does exist is as untrue in fact as it sets the mark of impracticability on every theory of what ought to be, which starts from it.
And that last remark suggests that there is another way of regarding Rousseau's speculations. It may be pointed out that, after all, whatever estimate we may form of him, the author of works which have made such a noise in the world could not have been a mere fool; and that if, in their plain and obvious sense, the doctrines which he advanced are so easily upset, it is probable that he had in his mind something which is different from that sense.
I am a good deal disposed to think that this is the case. There is much to be said in favor of the view that Rousseau, having got hold of a plausible hypothesis, more or less unconsciously made up a clothing of imaginary facts to hide its real nakedness. He was not the first nor the last philosopher to perform this feat.
As soon as men began to think about political problems, it must have struck them that, if the main object of society was the welfare of its members (and until this became clear, political action could not have risen above the level of instinct),[1] there were all sorts of distinctions among men, and burdens laid upon them, which nowise contributed to that end. Even before the great leveler, Rome, had actually thrown down innumerable social and national party-walls, had absorbed all other forms of citizenship into her own, and brought the inhabitants of what was then known as the world under one system of obligations—thoughtful
- ↑ It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts. I can not doubt that human society existed before language or any ethical consciousness. Gregarious animals form polities in which they act according to rules conducive to the welfare of the whole society, although, of course, it would be absurd to say that they obey laws in the juridical sense. The polities of the masterless dogs in Eastern cities are well known. And, in any street of an English town, one may observe a small dog chased by a bigger, who turns round the moment he has entered his own territory and defies the other; while, usually, after various manifestations of anger and contempt, the bigger withdraws. No doubt the small dog has had previous experience of the arrival of assistance under such circumstances, and the big one of the effects of sticks and stones and other odd missiles; no doubt the associations thus ingrained are the prime source of the practical acknowledgment of ownership on both sides. I suspect it has been very much the same among men.
