Balfour’s response was striking. The claim that all men were created equal, Balfour objected, ‘was an eighteenth-century proposition which he did not believe was true’. The Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth century had taught other lessons. It might be asserted that ‘in a certain sense . . . all men of a particular nation were created equal’. But to assert that ‘a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European’ was, to Balfour, patent nonsense.
