France, to filter down from the speculative thinkers into a general
popular acceptance, as an active principle to be used in the shaping of
affairs, and to become more potent in the popular mind than tradition or
habit. The attempt is made to apply it to society with a brutal logic;
and we might despair as to the result, if we did not know that the world
is not ruled by logic. Nothing is so fascinating in the hands of the
half-informed as a neat dogma; it seems the perfect key to all
difficulties. The formula is applied in contempt and ignorance of the
past, as if building up were as easy as pulling down, and as if society
were a machine to be moved by mechanical appliances, and not a living
organism composed of distinct and sensitive beings. Along with the spread
of a belief in the uniformity of natural law has unfortunately gone a
suggestion of parallelism of the moral law to it, and a notion that if we
can discover the right formula, human society and government can be
organized with a mathematical justice to all the parts. By many the dogma
of equality is held to be that formula, and relief from the greater evils
of the social state is expected from its logical extension.

Let us now consider some of the present movements and tendencies that are
related, more or less, to this belief:

I. Absolute equality is seen to depend upon absolute supremacy of the
state. Professor Henry Fawcett says, "Excessive dependence on the state
is the most prominent characteristic of modern socialism." "These
proposals to prohibit inheritance, to abolish private property, and to
make the state the owner of all the capital and the administrator of the
entire industry of the country are put forward as representing socialism
in its ultimate and highest development."--["Socialism in Germany and the
United States," Fortnightly Review, November, 1878.]