EQUALITY IN RIGHTS by G.

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 12, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 28.

EQUALITY IN RIGHTS.

By G.

THE Declaration of Independence declares that "we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

If it is a fact "that all men are created equal," then no man or combination of men has a right to disturb this equality. In what, therefore, does this alleged equality consist? is a pertinent question. It is not in stature, nor in color, nor in intelligence, nor in disposition. However equal, or similar, these conditions might have been in all men, had sin not entered to disarrange for the time the harmony of God's work in the earth, is not the question. Civil government is concerned with the best temporal good of man as he is. Then it is here and now that we must contemplate, as a self-evident truth, the doctrine of equality. So, in the consideration of man as he is here and now, there is but one point of view from which this God-designed equality is apparent, and that is in the matter of rights. And here is the place where the framers of the Declaration stood, when, in laying the foundation of this government, they acknowledged and asserted that "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

The government which they proposed to establish was not designed to create rights, but to "secure" the free exercise of the rights with which the Creator had already endowed mankind. The government to which the Colonies were then subject was denying this exercise of rights, hence the colonists declared for "a new order of things"—a government having for its object to provide for the best good of all the people.

The idea prevails to a great extent to-day that the government is designed to provide for the best good of the majority; but that is a perversion of the true spirit of government, for it ignores the rights of a part of the people. It is but a slight modification of the monarchical doctrine that governments are established for the special benefit of rulers and their friends, be they never so few. This is always the tendency even of republics, when they become strong, and imbued with the spirit of partyism, and therefore corrupt. Hence the necessity of a constant reiteration and maintenance of the principle that all men are endowed by their Creator with an "unalienable" equality of rights. G.