équité, or social proportionality[1]. Equité does not change justice: but, always taking équité for the base, it superadds esteem, and thereby forms in man a third degree of sociability. Equité makes it at once our duty and our pleasure to aid the weak who have need of us, and to make them our equals; to pay to the strong a just tribute of gratitude and honor, without enslaving ourselves to them; to cherish our neighbors, friends, and equals, for that which we receive from them, even by right of exchange. Equité is sociability raised to its ideal by reason and justice; its commonest manifestation is urbanity or politeness, which, among certain nations, sums up in a single word nearly all the social duties.
Now, this feeling is unknown among the beasts, who love and cling to each other, and show their preferences, but who cannot conceive of esteem, and who are incapable of generosity, admiration, or politeness.
This feeling does not spring from intelligence, which calculates, computes, and balances, but does not love; which sees, but does not feel. As justice is the product of social instinct and reflection combined, so équité is a product of justice and taste combined—that is, of our powers of judging and of idealizing.
This product—the third and last degree of human sociability—is determined by our complex mode of association; in which inequality, or rather the divergence of faculties, and the speciality of functions—tending of themselves to isolate laborers—demand a more active sociability.
That is why the force which oppresses while protecting is
- ↑ I mean here by équité what the Latins called humanitas,—that is, the kind of sociability which is peculiar to man. Humanity, gentle and courteous to all, knows how to distinguish ranks, virtues, and capacities without injury to any. It is the just distribution of social sympathy and universal love.
