e of the ambiguity indicated above, different people with
different interests, all of them good patriotic Americans, draw very
different inferences from the doctrine of equal rights. The man of
conservative ideas and interests means by the rights, which are to be
equally exercised, only those rights which are defined and protected by
the law--the more fundamental of which are the rights to personal
freedom and to private property. The man of radical ideas, on the other
hand, observing, as he may very clearly, that these equal rights cannot
possibly be made really equivalent to equal opportunities, bases upon
the same doctrine a more or less drastic criticism of the existing
economic and social order and sometimes of the motives of its
beneficiaries and conservators. The same principle, differently
interpreted, is the foundation of American political orthodoxy and
American political heterodoxy. The same measure of reforming
legislation, such as the new Inter-state Commerce Law, seems to one
party a wholly inadequate attempt to make the exercise of individual
rights a little more equal, while it seems to others an egregious
violation of the principle itself. What with reforming legislation on
the one hand and the lack of it on the other, the once sweet air of the
American political mansion is soured by complaints. Privileges and
discriminations seem to lurk in every political and economic corner. The
"people" are appealing to the state to protect them against the
usurpations of the corporations and the Bosses. The government is
appealing to the courts to protect the shippers against the railroads.
The corporations are appealing to the Federal courts to protect them
from the unfair treatment of state legislatures. Employers are fighting
trades-unionism, because it denies equal rights to their employers. The
unionists are entreating public opinion to protect them against the
unfairness of "government by injunction." To the free trader the whole
protectionist system seems a flagrant discrimination on behalf of a
certain portion of the community. Everybody seems to be clamoring for a
"Square Deal" but nobody seems to be getting it.

The ambiguity of the principle of equal rights and the resulting
confusion of counsel are so obvious that there must be some good reason
for their apparently unsuspected existence. The truth is that Americans
have not readjusted their political ideas to the teaching of their
political and economic