ON BEING " DONE."
AGREAT many people who would hardly stoop to pick up a sixpence would walk miles rather than be cheated out of a threepenny bit; being cheated, they would willingly spend hall-a-crown in order once more to come by their own. A small deception involving a small loss, wrongs so insignifi• cant to the onlooker that they are best described in slang terms which convey a sense of the ridiculous, touch in them a source of anger which in others is only tapped by insult, To half their friends their righteous indignation is incom- prehensible. If these puzzled people find that they themselves have been "done," the thought leaves them rather sad, or quite indifferent, according to the loss involved. Occasionally even they feel a little amused at their own expense, and nothing would induce them to risk a further loss for the sake of equity in the abstract— (we are of course speaking of insignificant sums, of being " had "—not of the cruel injustices which involve of necessity suffering and resentment).
But though we are only dealing with trifles, they are trifles which show a radical difference of disposition—as great a difference as can exist between persons of equal moral worth. If we put aside all those who are actuated by the repellent fault of meanness or by the inconvenient quality of pugnacity, the people who cannot bear to be cheated represent those in whom the sense of justice is strong and living; in whom,indeed, it is the motive power of the moral nature. The men and women, on the other hand, who see themselves " done " without any emotion, however good or trustworthy they may be, are not moved by that dynamic force. An insult offered to the blind goddess and her scales does not strike them as a profanity. They are no worshippers of hers.
It used to be taken for granted that a sense of justice was the root of all virtue; now it seems to be regarded as the flower, to be, in fact, the most exclusively human of all the virtues. Huxley affirmed that the love of one's neighbour was an earlier moral sentiment than the abstract sense of justice to which it gave rise. Certainly our inferior relations upon four legs, while they show both affection and self-sacrifice, have no sense of abstract justice. Perhaps, then, we may regard those in whom the sense of justice is weak as primitive. We do not mean that they resemble savages, or that they are, in
any particular, ill-conducted. They are not necessarily un- developed morally—often they are very highly developed —but they have developed upon primitive lines. So far as conduct goes, there are plenty of substitutes for a sense of justice. Sympathy will, in nine eases out of ten, keep a man from taking advantage, and that useful quality, pride, which does instead of so many virtues, will easily cover the tenth case. A good man without much sense of justice is most often unjust to himself. His sense of moral beauty, while it is keen, is incomplete. He has a love of colour but little appreciation of line. At every moral juncture he wishes to do well, to play a hand- some part, but he is incurably ignorant of—is even perhaps incapable of grasping—the moral anatomy of the situation. He does what is generous because he is not quite sure what is just, and fears to do what is wrong. An immense number of women are in this case, and we believe it is commoner among men than is usually believed. The false idea that the sense of justice is strong in all but bad people makes the careless moral critic impute it to every well-doing individual.
There is, however, a certain strength in the man with a strong sense of justice and a weakness somewhere in the man who is without it. Experience of life may teach the first to say de minimis, and he may learn never to make himself ridiculous, but he will always feel, however secretly, a shock when the rules of the game are violated ever so little. The wrong note jars on him. He would like to stop the per- formance, and have the passage played over again. He is con- scious, too, of the solidarity of the race ; he takes, even if uncon- sciously, an interest in whether other people do right, builds his bit of the tower of civilization and makes them build theirs. There are no born rulers without this sense. The good man with a strong sense of justice does really care to improve the world, even though he would deny the charge. He wants to strengthen the moral backbone of society, to keep bright the armour of sincerity which alone can save it from destruction. Good men without a sense of justice care chiefly to ease its sufferings, mental and bodily, and show weakness most where their own interests are not concerned. They are strongly moved by pity and incline always to the cause of the under dog. As critics, however, they are often useful to the cause of justice. They have no temptation to fix their minds upon the accuracy of the scales, and so forget in delicate comparisons the facts of positive weight. " So-and-so was over-harsh," they will say; " his action was positively cruel. What has the provocation to do with it F What he did ought not to be done." A lack of the sense of justice is not a defect of which many people are aware. They do not look up to the man who has it, but very often condemn him for a want of quick sympathy, and always feel that there is something despicable in taking much account of little matters, having an instinct to avoid friction.
To return to our theory—that the man who is amused, and not annoyed, when he finds that he has been " done " is a man of primitive moral type. The love of mystification is inherent in human nature, and some of us cannot resent it. All children love to take someone in. So does the primitive savage. The silliest riddle will delight the most intelligent child. Some sentence with a "catch" in it appeals with irritating certainty to the childish mind. They have an astonishing wish to dress up, for instance. At the back of every man's memory lies some childish joke at which be still smiles, and of which a trick was a part. Slight deceptions are apparently natural vents for high spirits. Something of this unreasonable delight lingers in us all. All good talk which is not debate has its origin in " pretending." The instinct is very deep-rooted, and lies close to the origins of humour and romance. When the instinct for romance—that is, what we usually call the artistic instinct—is very strong, the sense of justice is, we think, seldom keen and dominating. People created to enjoy the pageant of life to the full have not, as a rule, got it. It limits the interest. It may, of course, be truly said that all moral sentiments do this in some degree, and in the abstract such an argument may be maintained. Practically, however, sympathy increases the powers of perception to a marked extent, and while vivifying the drama saves the soul of the spectator. Sympathy, plus self-respect, will replace the seven living virtues, however we may like to define them. Children have, of course, a strong feeling for revenge, and if revenge is "a sort of wild justice," then justice is the earliest of all sentiments. But it is not distinctively human. A jelly fish, we should imagine, is capable of it. Revenge is not the origin of that ever-present sense of fair play, which is the outcome rather than the origin of civilization, and which goes on in- creasing in strength while revenge weakens with the years, but which is a less instinctive thing than either pity or romance.
Have we made out that people who do not mind being "done " are inclined to be sly P We do not think so. Slyness and pettiness are inseparable companions, and no disinterested person is ever sly. But they have not, as a rule, the qualities which make for progress, either in the best—or the second- best—sense of the word.
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