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[82]
wishing to establish the French Constitution on principles which it has just acknowledged and declared, abolishes irrevocably the institutions which bounded liberty and equality of rights. There is no longer, neither nobility, nor peerage, nor hereditary distinctions, nor distinction of order, nor feudal rule, nor patrimonial justices, nor any titles, denominations and prerogatives, which were thence derived, nor any order of chivalry, nor any corporations or decorations, for which proofs of nobility are required, or which supposed distinctions of birth, nor any other superiority than that of public functionaries in discharge of their functions. * * * There is no longer, for any part of the nation, nor for any individual, any privilege or exception to the law, common to all Frenchmen.’
（Moniteur, 1791, No. 259.)
The Declaration of Rights of Condorcet—Feb. 15, 1793—contained fresh inculcations of the Equality of men, Article 8th saying: ‘
The Law ought to be equal for all,’—‘Instruction is the need of all, and society owes it equally to all its members.’
The natural and imprescriptible rights of men are ‘Equality, liberty, safety, property.’
And in the next article it shows what is meant by Equality.
It says, ‘All men are equal by nature, and before the law.’
（Moniteur, 1793, No. 178.) Here we first meet this form of definition.
At a later day, after France had passed through an unprecedented series of political vicissitudes, in some of which the rights of Equality had been trampled under foot, when, at the revolution of 1830, Louis Philippe was called to a ‘throne surrounded by republican institutions,’ the charter then promulgated repeated this phrase.
In its first article it declared, ‘that Frenchmen are equal before the law, whatever may may be their titles or ranks.’
While recognizing this peculiar enunciation of the Equality of men, as more specific and satisfactory than the naked statement that all men are borne equal, it is impossible not to be reminded that this form of speech finds its prototype in the ancient Greek language.
In the history of Herodotus, we are told that ‘the government of the many has the most beautiful name of ι>σονομία’—or Equality before the law. (Book 3, § 80.) Thus this remarkable language, by its comprehensiveness and flexibility, in an age when Equality before the law was practically unknown, nevertheless supplied a single word, which is not to be
