Charles Dudley Warner

“ One of the most striking features in our progress from barbarism to civilization is the proper adjustment of the work for men and women. One test of a civilization is the difference of this work. This is a question not merely of division of labor, but of differentiation with regard to sex. It not only takes into account structural differences and physiological disadvantages, but it recognizes the finer and higher use of woman in society.
The attainable, not to say the ideal, society requires an increase rather than a decrease of the differences between the sexes. ”

“ If Christianity has been and is the force in promoting and shaping civilization that we regard it, we may be sure that it is not as a political agent, or an annuller of the inequalities of life, that we are to expect aid from it. Its office, or rather one of its chief offices on earth, is to diffuse through the world, regardless of condition or possessions or talent or opportunity, sympathy and a recognition of the value of manhood underlying every lot and every diversity—a value not measured by earthly accidents, but by heavenly standards. This we understand to be "Christian equality." ”

“ The Constitution is the most practical state document ever made. It announces no dogmas, proclaims no theories. It accepted society as it was, with its habits and traditions; raising no abstract questions whether men are born free or equal, or how society ought to be organized. It is simply a working compact, made by "the people," to promote union, establish justice, and secure the blessings of liberty; and the equality is in the assumption of the right of "the people of the United States" to do this. ”

“ It is the duty of the government to provide for all the people, and the sovereign people will see to it that it does. The election franchise is a natural right—a man's weapon to protect himself. It may be asked, If it is just this, and not a sacred trust accorded to be exercised for the benefit of society, why may not a man sell it, if it is for his interest to do so? ”

“ 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. ”

“ We need to remember that the Creator of man, and not man himself, formed society and instituted government; that God is always behind human society and sustains it; that marriage and the family and all social relations are divinely established; that man's duty, coinciding with his right, is, by the light of history, by experience, by observation of men, and by the aid of revelation, to find out and make operative, as well as he can, the divine law in human affairs. ”

“ We have thus passed in review some of the tendencies of the age. We have only touched the edges of a vast subject, and shall be quite satisfied if we have suggested thought in the direction indicated. But in this limited view of our complex human problem it is time to ask if we have not pushed the dogma of equality far enough. Is it not time to look the facts squarely in the face, and conform to them in our efforts for social and political amelioration? ”

“ At the bar of Christianity the poor man is the equal of the rich, and the learned of the unlearned, since intellectual acquisition is no guarantee of moral worth. The content that Christianity would bring to our perturbed society would come from the practical recognition of the truth that all conditions may be equally honorable. The assertion of the dignity of man and of labor is, we imagine, the sum and substance of the equality and communism of the New Testament. ”

“ The moral aristocracy was mowed down in the name of uniformity; the social aristocracy is mowed down in the name of equality. For the second time an abstract principle, and with the same effect, buries its blade in the heart of a living society. ”

“ Fortunately, if today we could make every man white, every woman as like man as nature permits, give to every human being the same opportunity of education, and divide equally among all the accumulated wealth of the world, tomorrow differences, unequal possession, and differentiation would begin again. ”

“ Society and government should be recast till they conform to the theory, or, let us say, to its exaggerations. Men can unmake what they have made. There is no higher authority anywhere than the will of the majority, no matter what the majority is in intellect and morals. Fifty-one ignorant men have a natural right to legislate for the one hundred, as against forty-nine intelligent men. ”

“ Notwithstanding the world-wide advertisement of the French experiment, it has taken almost a century for the dogma of equality, at least outside of 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 ”

“ Nevertheless, these dogmas, independent of the circumstances in which they were uttered, have exercised and do exercise a very powerful influence upon the thinking of mankind on social and political topics, and are being applied without limitations, and without recognition of the fact that if they are true, in the sense meant by their originators, they are not the whole truth. It is to be noticed that rights are mentioned, but not duties, and that if political rights only are meant, political duties are not inculcated as of equal moment. ”

“ Perhaps a better-founded charge is that a system of equal education, with its superficiality, creates discontent with the condition in which a majority of men must be—that of labor—a distaste for trades and for hand-work, an idea that what is called intellectual labor (let us say, casting up accounts in a shop, or writing trashy stories for a sensational newspaper) is more honorable than physical labor; and encourages the false notion that "the elevation of the working classes" implies the removal of men and women from those classes. ”

“ What a mischievous idea is that which has grown, even in the United States, that manual labor is discreditable! There is surely some defect in the theory of equality in our society which makes domestic service to be shunned as if it were a disgrace. ”

“ Race distinctions ought to be maintained for the sake of the best development of the race, and for the continuance of that mutual reaction and play of peculiar forces between races which promise the highest development for the whole. It is not for nothing, we may suppose, that differentiation has gone on in the world; and we doubt that either benevolence or self-interest requires this age to attempt to restore an assumed lost uniformity, and fuse the race traits in a tiresome homogeneity. ”

“ Working by this recognition, we shall save the race from many failures and bitter disappointments, and spare the world the spectacle of republics ending in despotism and experiments in government ending in anarchy. ”

“ The enjoyment of social life rests very largely upon the encounter and play of the subtle peculiarities which mark the two sexes; and society, in the limited sense of the word, not less than the whole structure of our civilization, requires the development of these peculiarities. It is in diversity, and not in an equality tending to uniformity, that we are to expect the best results from the race. ”

“ The well-known theory upon which Rousseau's superstructure rests is that society is the result of a compact, a partnership between men. They have not made an agreement to submit their individual sovereignty to some superior power, but they have made a covenant of brotherhood. It is a contract of association. Men were, and ought to be, equal cooperators, not only in politics, but in industries and all the affairs of life. All the citizens are participants in the sovereign authority. Their sovereignty is inalienable; power may be transmitted, but not will ”

“ It must be observed, further, that the dogma of equality is not satisfied by the usual admission that one is in favor of an equality of rights and opportunities, but is against the sweeping application of the theory made by the socialists and communists. The obvious reply is that equal rights and a fair chance are not possible without equality of condition, and that property and the whole artificial constitution of society necessitate inequality of condition. ”

“ What today is called by many the emancipation of woman would ultimately end in the dissolution of the family, and, if carried out, render poor service to the majority of women. If man and woman were placed entirely on the same level, and if in the competition between the two sexes nothing but an actual superiority should decide, it is to be feared that woman would soon be relegated to a condition as hard as that in which she is found among all barbarous nations. ”

“ He accepts the doctrine that men are formed by laws, but holds that they are by nature good, and that laws, by establishing a division of the products of nature, broke up the sociability of men, and that all political and moral evils are the result of private property. ”

“ In the popular apprehension it is apt to be confounded with uniformity; and this not without reason, since in many applications of the theory the tendency is to produce likeness or uniformity. Nature, with equal laws, tends always to diversity; and doubtless the just notion of equality in human affairs consists with unlikeness. Our purpose is to note some of the tendencies of the dogma as it is at present understood by a considerable portion of mankind. ”

“ One hundred thousand Frenchmen driven out at the end of the seventeenth century, and one hundred thousand driven out at the end of the eighteenth! Mark how an intolerant democracy completes the work of an intolerant monarchy! ”