act is the formal denial of the
possibility of successfully overcoming the difficulty.

"Although man deprives himself in the civil state of many advantages
which he holds from nature, yet he acquires in return others so great,
his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas extend, his
sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is raised to such a degree,
that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often degrade him
below that from which he has emerged, he would be bound to bless
without ceasing the happy moment which rescued him from it for ever,
and out of a stupid and blind animal made an intelligent being and a
man."[176] The little parenthesis as to the frequent degradation
produced by the abuses of the social condition, does not prevent us
from recognising in the whole passage a tolerably complete surrender
of the main position which was taken up in the two Discourses. The
short treatise on the Social Contract is an inquiry into the just
foundations and most proper form of that very political society, which
the Discourses showed to have its foundation in injustice, and to be
incapable of receiving any form proper for the attainment of the full
measure of human happiness.

Inequality in the same way is no longer denounced, but accepted and
defined. Locke's influence has begun to tell. The two principal
objects of every system of legislation are declared to be liberty and
equality. By equality we are warned not to understand that the degrees
of power and wealth should be absolutely the same, but that in respect
of power, such power should be out of reach of any violence, and be
invariably exercised in virtue of the laws; and in respect of riches,
that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor
enough to sell himself. Do you say this equality is a mere chimera? It
is precisely because the force of things is constantly tending to
destroy equality, that the force of legislation ought as constantly to
be directed towards upholding it.[177] This is much clearer than the
indefinite way of speaking which we have already noticed in the second
Discourse. It means neither more nor less than that equality before
the law which is one of the elementary marks of a perfectly free
community.

The idea of the law being constantly directed to counteract the
tendencies to violent inequalities in material possessions among
different members of a society, is too vague to be criticised. Does it
c