Harold J. Laski

However wrong or unwise we may think the actions of men so accused, we have to remember that they represent, as a general rule, the expression of a deep-felt resentment against social injustice.

But it is our duty, too, to respect that protest when it is sincerely made.

And we cannot, therefore, permit attack upon it because it represents ideas or experience alien from our own.

I am, in fact, denying that they owe their existence to the state, or that the latter is entitled, by means of its agents, to prescribe the terms upon which they can live.

The special place of the state in the great society does not, in my judgment, give it an unlimited right to effect that co-ordination which is its function on any terms it pleases.

The principles of a legitimate co-ordination bind the state as much as they bind any other body of men.

Each of us finds himself part of a vast organization in the midst of which we must seek the realization of desire.

We have to find others with kindred desires who will join hands with us to proclaim the urgency of their realization.

The acute mind of Aristotle long ago saw that the craving for equality is one of the most profound roots of revolution.

The absence of equality means special privilege for some and not for others, a special privilege which is not, so to say, in nature but in a deliberate contrivance of the social environment.

Men like Harrington and Madison and Marx all insisted, and with truth, that whatever the forms of state, political power will, in fact, belong to the owners of economic power.

We need not argue that our happiness depends upon the possession of political power; we can argue that exclusion from it is likely to mean exclusion from that which largely determines the contours of happiness.

And it follows that the more equal are the social rights of citizens, the more likely they are to be able to utilize their freedom in realms worthy of exploration.

Certainly the history of the abolition of special privilege has been, also, the history of the expansion of what in our inheritance was open to the common man.

To treat men so different as Newton and Byron, Cromwell and Rousseau, in a precisely similar way is patently absurd.

But equality does not mean identity of treatment.

It is an insistence that there is no difference inherent in nature between the claims of men to happiness.

It is therefore an argument that society shall not construct barriers against those claims which weigh more heavily upon some than upon others.

It shall not exclude men from the legal profession because they are black or Wesleyans or freemasons.

It shall not deny access to the Courts to men of whose opinions society in general disapproves.

It means the recognition of urgent need in all--food, for instance, and clothing, and shelter--before there is special recognition of non-urgent claims in any.

Equality, so regarded, seems to me inescapably connected with freedom.

For equality, so regarded, seems, in the first place, to mean the organization of opportunities; and, in the second place, it means that no man’s opportunities are sacrificed, except on terms of social principle, to the claims of another.

In the view I am taking, no child could be deprived of education that another might receive it; but in a choice of men say for a post in the Treasury, one might be preferred to another on the ground of ability or character or training.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.