Principles of western civilisation

104 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

denied in all other political constitutions. It is the doctrine of the native equality of men that has been behind the long movement in our Western world which has emancipated the people and slowly equipped them with political power; and it is the repudiation of it which constitutes the ultimate fact in every phase and stage of the resistance which this movement has encountered. Professor Ritchie has enumerated? the “natural rights” which have been most commonly claimed as such in the modern movement towards Democracy, as the rights of life, of liberty, of toleration, of public meeting and association, of contract, of resistance to oppression, of equality, of property, and of pursuing and obtaining happiness. But they may all be resolved into the claim of the native equality of men. Under whatever form expressed, and through whatever involved process we follow it, down even into the theories of the followers of Marx, it is this doctrine of the equality of men which underlies, as a first principle, the creed of every democratic party in the politics of the modern world.

Nevertheless, what we see is that by the men with whom the assertion of “natural right” originated in England the doctrine of the native equality of men was most certainly not accepted as a first principle. It had no meaning apart by itself. We see that it was accepted at the time, as it was accepted later in Locke's writings,” only as a corollary to a conception of the relationship in which men were held to stand to a meaning in their lives which transcended the meaning of the interests included

1 Cf. Natural Rights, vi.-xiv. 2 Cf. Two Treatises of Government, ii. ch. ii.