HKB
now plays no insignificant role in the agitation carried on by the socialist movement of all countries. The establishment of its scientific soundness has a value for the proletarian agitation.
The idea that all men have something in common as men and that they are equal with respect to that common quality is naturally older than history. But the modern doctrine of equality is something quite different than that. This derives from the property of humanity, common to man, the equality of man, as man, or at least of all citizens of a given state or of all members of a given society. Until the conclusion of equality of rights in the state and society was deduced from the original notion of relative equality, and until this conclusion was to be stated as something natural and self evident, many thousands of years had to pass and indeed have passed. In the oldest and most elementary communities it may be said that equality of rights among the members existed in the highest degree, women, slaves, and foreigners, however, being excluded. Among the Greeks and Romans inequality existed to a greater degree. Greeks and barbarians, freemen and slaves, citizens and subjects, Roman citizens and Roman subjects (to employ a comprehensive expression) that these should have any claim to equality of political rights would have been regarded by the ancients necessarily as madness. Under the Roman Empire there was a complete elimination of all these distinctions with the exception of those of freemen and slaves. There arose therefore as far as the freemen were concerned that equality of private individuals upon which Roman law was founded and developed as the most perfect system of jurisprudence based on private property with which we are acquainted. But while the contradiction of freemen and slaves existed there could be no statement based upon the universal equality of man as such, as was recently shown in the slave states of the Northern American Union.
Christianity recognised one equality on the part of all men, that of an equal taint of original sin, which entirely corresponded with its character as a religion of slaves and the oppressed. In the next place it recognised completely the equality of the elect but it only declared this at the beginning of its teaching. The traces of common property in possessions which may be found occasionally in the earliest days of the religion was based rather upon the mutual assistance which persecuted people hold out to each other, than upon any real concepts of human equality. Very soon the establishment of the antithesis between the priesthood and the laity put an end to even this expression of Christian equality. The inundation of Western Europe by the Germans abolished for centuries all concepts of equality by the creation of a universal, social and political gradation of rank of a much more complicated nature than had existed up to that time. Contemporaneously with this Western and Middle Europe entered upon a historical development, shaped for the first time a compact civilisation, and a system which was on the one hand dynamic and on the other conservative, the leading national states. Thereupon a soil was prepared for the declaration of the equality of human rights so recently made.