Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
I dissent from each of these propositions. In the present letter I shall examine
the rst and the fourth, which may be regarded as an illustration of the rst.
On a subsequent occasion I shall consider the second and third. First, as to the
proposition that justice requires that all people should live in society as equals. I
have already shown that this is equivalent to the proposition that it is expedient
that all people should live in society as equals. Can this be proved? for it is certainly
not a self-evident proposition.
I think that if the rights and duties which laws create are to be generally
advantageous, they ought to be adapted to the situation of the persons who
enjoy or are subject to them. They ought to recognize both substantial equality
and substantial inequality, and they should from time to time be so moulded and
altered as always to represent fairly well the existing state of society. Government,
in a word, ought to t society as a man’s clothes t him. To establish by law rights
and duties which assume that people are equal when they are not is like trying
to make clumsy feet look handsome by the help of tight boots. No doubt it may
be necessary to legislate in such a manner as to correct the vices of society, or to
protect it against special dangers or diseases to which it is liable. Law in this case is
analogous to surgery, and the rights and duties imposed by it might be compared
to the irons which are sometimes contrived for the purpose of supporting a weak
limb or keeping it in some particular position. As a rule, however, it is otherwise.
Rights and duties should be so moulded as to clothe, protect, and sustain society
in the position which it naturally assumes. The proposition, therefore, that justice
demands that people should live in society as equals may be translated thus: “It is
inexpedient that any law should recognize any inequality between human beings.”
This appears to me to involve the assertion, “There are no inequalities between
human beings of sucient importance to inuence the rights and duties which it
is expedient to confer upon them.” This proposition I altogether deny. I say that
there are many such dierences, some of which are more durable and more widely
extended than others, and of which some are so marked and so important that,
unless human nature is radically changed, we cannot even imagine their removal;
and of these the dierences of age and sex are the most important.
The dierence of age is so distinct a case of inequality that even Mr. Mill does
not object to its recognition. He admits, as every one must, that perhaps a third
or more of the average term of human life—and that the portion of it in which
the strongest, the most durable, and beyond all comparison the most important
impressions are made on human beings, the period in which character is formed—
must be passed by every one in a state of submission, dependence, and obedience
to orders the objects of which are usually most imperfectly understood by the
persons who receive them. Indeed, as I have pointed out in previous letters, Mr.
Mill is disposed rather to exaggerate than to underrate the inuence of education
and the powers of educators. Is not this a clear case of inequality of the strongest
kind, and does it not at all events aord a most instructive precedent in favor of
the recognition by law of a marked natural distinction? If children were regarded
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