That is the whole meaning of the process of economic and social development traced in certain preceding chapters.
The strong and capable men not only conquer, but they seek to perpetuate their conquests by occupying all the strategic points in the economic and political battle-field--whereby they obtain certain more or less permanent advantages over their fellow-democrats.

Thus in so far as the equal rights are freely exercised, they are bound to result in inequalities; and these inequalities are bound to make for their own perpetuation, and so to provoke still further discrimination.

Wherever the principle has been allowed to mean what it seems to mean, it has determined and encouraged its own violation.

The marriage which it is supposed to consecrate between liberty and equality gives birth to unnatural children, whose nature it is to devour one or the other of their parents.
The only way in which the thorough-going adherent of the principle of equal rights can treat these tendencies to discrimination, when they develop, is rigidly to repress them; and this tendency to repression is now beginning to take possession of those Americans who represent the pure Democratic tradition.

They propose to crush out the chief examples of effective individual and associated action, which their system of democracy has encouraged to develop.