Incarnation. Black or white, conspicuous or
obscure, intelligent or stupid, offspring of a creative race or bound by
the limitations of one that is static or in process of decay, there is
no difference in the universal claim to justice, charity, and
opportunity. The soul of a Cantonese river-man, of a Congo slave, of an
East Side Jew, is in itself as essentially precious and worth saving as
the soul of a bishop, of a descendant of a Norman viking or an Irish
king, or that of a volunteer soldier in the late armies of France or
Great Britain or the United States.

Here lies absolute and final equality, and the State, the Law, the
Church are bound to guard this equality in the one case and the other
with equal force; indeed, those of the lower racial and family types
claim even more faithful guardianship than those of the higher, for they
can accomplish less for themselves and by themselves. But the
fundamental and inescapable inequality, in intellect, in character, and
in capacity, which I insist is one of the conditioning factors in life,
is vociferously denied, but ruthlessly enforced, by the people that will
be the first to denounce any restatement of what is after all no more
than a patent fact.

A little less enthusiasm for shibboleths, and a little more intelligent
regard for history and palpable conditions, will show that the assumed
equality between men "on the strength of their manhood alone," the
sufficiency of education for correcting the accidental differences that
show themselves, and the scheme of life that is worked out along
democratic lines on the basis of this essential (or potential) equality,
are "fond things vainly imagined" which must be radically modified
before the world can begin a sane and wholesome building-up after the
great purgation of war.

That equality between men which exists by virtue of the presence in each
of an immortal soul, involves an even distribution of justice and the
protection of law, without distinction of persons, and an even measure
of charity and compassion, but it does not involve the admission of a
claim to equality of action or the denial of varied status, since
race-values, both of blood and of the _gens_ enter in to establish
differences in character, in intelligence and in capacity which cannot
be changed by education, environment or heredity within periods which
are practical considerations with society. If we could still hold the
old Darwinian dogmas of the ori