iversal 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.

The feudal middle ages moreover developed the class in its womb
destined to be the apostle of the modern agitation for equality, the
bourgeois class. In the beginning even under the feudal system the
bourgeois class had developed the prevalent hand-industry and the
exchange of products even within feudal society to a high degree
considering the circumstances, until with the close of the fifteenth
century the great discoveries of lands beyond the seas opened before
it a new and individual course. The trade beyond Europe which up to
that time had been carried on between the Italians and the Levant was
now extended to America and the Indies and soon exceeded in amount the
reciprocal trade of the European countries as well as the internal
commerce of any particular land. American gold and silver flooded
Europe and like a decomposing element penetrated all the fissures,
crevices and pores of feudal society. The system of hand-labor was no
longer sufficient for the growing demand, it was replaced by
manufacture in the leading industries of th