The notion that all men are equal is likewise reasonable and useful when taken in its historical setting. It meant, in contradiction to the mediæval notion, that whatever rights the state might give to some, it should give to all, and that whatever burdens it laid on some, it should lay on all, without distinction of persons or classes. No such thing has ever been realized or ever can be, and the doctrine would need modification and limitation to make it true, but, as a revolt against mediævalism, it is intelligible. In its best form it is our modern "equality before the law"; but we are constantly striving to use the state to give privileges, and then to make the privileges equal, or to give them to everybody. Turn all such propositions as we will, they are only attempts to lift ourselves by our boot-straps, or to bring good things into existence by decree.
Ever since it has been accepted doctrine that there are natural rights, innumerable attempts have been made to formulate "declarations" of them, that is, to tell what they are. No such attempt has ever succeeded, and the history of the effort to define and specify what the rights of man are is instructive for the sense and value of the notion itself. At present this effort is prosecuted, not by parliaments and conventions, but by social philosophers. As these attempts go on, they develop more and more completely the futility of the notion, or its purely mischievous character as a delusion which draws us away from what might profit us.
Among the latest enunciations of the fundamental and universal rights of man, is that of "the right to the full product of labor." This has been declared, in the most intelligent exposition of it known to me,[1] to be the
- ↑ A. Menger, "Das Recht auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag." Stuttgart, 1886.
