The first-class poets are wise men as well as poets. Though Shakespeare excels all in imagination, it never "gets between his legs and trips him up." He was no slave to false theorizings of a preponderating imagination. Shakespeare was " all there"; so he saw truth and understood human nature as it is. We may say somewhat the same of Goethe.
Shakespeare says:—
"Take but degree away, untune that string,
And mark what discord follows."
Thus Shakespeare truly saw that equality and sameness mean discord and disorder. But the Socialist-Radical is for compulsory equality. Then the Socialist-Radical is for compulsory discord and disorder. Connected with this is, no doubt, the unceasing state of discord, disorder, and revolutions and civil wars we find among the equality-worshipping Latin races.
Pope says:—
"Order is Heaven's first law, and, that confessed,
Some are, and must be, greater than the rest."
This, again, means that equality and disorder go together.
A field has twenty horses in it. No two of these are equal. But they soon learn which is master, and in what order they stand; and then there is peace. If it were not so, there would be incessant fighting.
In the animal world there is first the homogeneous jelly-fish —that is, a creature with no organs; no head, no heart, no liver, and, indeed, no stomach even to speak of. Gradually evolution to higher types takes place, and then separate organs make their appearance. Thus, progress in living beings means increasing diversity of organs and functions, and the loss of homogeneous uniformity. So it is in a nation. An extremely savage tribe is homogeneous, like the jelly-fish; there is no diversity, there are no rulers, no classes; one man is like another; there is a dead level of degradation—the equality, in fact, worshipped by the Socialist-Radical. As society advances differences arise, till at length we come to the innumerable varieties and inequalities of conditions of character and of life that we see in highly-developed communities, some very few individual men rising till they have to be called by metaphoric expressions such as "angelic," "divine," "godly," etc. This progress is caused, in a very great degree, says science, by survival of the fittest in the struggle of life going on generation after generation. And the more liberty and keenness of competition exist, the more rapidly and completely this progress takes place.
Hitherto the love of liberty, at the necessary expense of equality, has been greater in England and America than in other countries, and thence diversity, or inequality, is greater in England and America than in other countries. But what may be the case in future no one can tell. The Socialist-Radical party in all countries, and all times, hate what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls the highly-differentiated conditions (inequality) of advanced civilization; and their envy and hatred inspire them with such intense energy that no one can ever foresee what civilization they will succeed in destroying next.
Freedom and its necessary accompaniment, inequality, are nature's laws and contrivances for raising men above savagery, or what in civilized countries are called the manners and customs of the criminal classes. On the other hand, destruction of liberty for the sake of getting the equality of brutes and savages is the law of the Radical, the Socialist, and the weaker races. Can we wonder that the Teutonic races are out-competing such races in peopling the earth? Celtic effeminacy, envy, class-hatred, and war against liberty, in order to get equality, may bring a nation down; but, take the world through, Teutonic manliness, liberty, and individuality must win, and do win.
"Freedom," says W. S. Lilly, "is rooted and grounded in inequality. Egalitarian Jacobinism, or Radicalism, is the negation of liberty. Collective despotism is as much an infringement of my rights and freedom as individual despotism, and of the two it is far the worse."
"The safeguarding of personal liberty," says Mr. Bayard, the American, "is the true seed of progress. The marvellous progress of America can only be accounted for by the freedom permitted to each individual citizen."
Without inequality there is no civilization, nothing higher than the lowest, dirty, predatory, homicidal, adulterous savage. Immediately the exceptionally-intelligent savage invents a spade inequality commences, the capitalist comes into existence, and the contrast between "the classes" and "the masses" begins.
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