JUSTICE.

THE Pall Mall Gazette has taken the opportunity of a sup- posed difference of feeling between men and women as to a trial for libel now pending, to make some remarks on the con- trast presented by the different place taken by justide in the male and female standard of morality, which, although we do not propose to enter into that particular aspect of the question, and do not even commit ourselves to any acceptance of the supposed fact, have suggested to us some reflections on the nature of what we believe to be the rarest of virtues, whether or not it is rarer in one sex than in the other. " I have found men more kind than I expected, and less just," said Johnson, at the close of his wide experience of life ; and the remark would be echoed, we suppose, by every one whose experience or whose anticipations have not been peculiar. Whether men or women exhibit least of the excellence that is so much more rare than generosity, we will not; inquire. The Pall Mall Gazetto.8 illustration of the in- equality (even if it be correct, on which we offer no opinion) does not strike us as happy. If women whose photographs have never been the object of admiring curiosity are rather pleased than otherwise at the embarrassing results of an opposite fate, we should say it is not so much that they lack justice as that they possess envy. To talk of the superior justice of men when the injured person is a beautiful woman, seems to us, if we may speak our mind, somewhat entertaining. However, we believe there is a deep truth under the confusion, and though we should not our- selves have presented. it in that form, we would, take advantage of it to exhibit the difficulty of even any accurate conception of justice. It is a quality, indeed, that is almost as little under- stood as it is practised.

There are good reasons why it should be little understood. It

cannot, in the nature of things, be conspicuously illustrated by any prominent actor in the world's history. A great statesman is hardly ever eminently just. Ile will not be a great statesman, if he is eminently the reverse of. just. But politics being what they are, we do not see how a. man who never allowed himself to be swayed into exaggeration of the defects of an adversary, or of the strength of his own case, could play a great part on the political stage. No mind was ever more just than Burke's, but his career, as a whole, is not an exhibition of justice. A. soldier is not equally at a disadvantage—we would cite the Duke of Wellington as a striking instance of this superiority. And no doubt actual warfare does not, as party war- fare, we fear, is apt to do, shade off into a sort of necessity for injustice of feeling. Its horrors absorb the animosities which produce them and which they produce, and in the best minds which come in contact with them, must beget, we should think, a profound recoil from all that even remotely resembles them. But every conspicuous public position is more or less political, and the rule that political feeling tends to obscure and conceal justice is, we believe, absolute. In the largest and most inter- esting exhibition of moral activity, therefore, this quality is almost by necessity latent, if it be there at all. Just as the heat which is spent in converting hot water to steam is imperceptible by the thermometer, so the equity which is

needed to keep a party-leader from glaring injustice is imper- ceptible to any moral test. How just that public man is who has appeared in the clash of faction only a little unjust, • few of us are in a condition to estimate. That atmosphere encourages a different set of virtues, and he who here does not greatly fail iu this one would elsewhere, we may be sure, strikingly excel in it.

We might, indeed, extend much more widely our assertion ; it is not alone the exigencies of party warfare, it is the exigencies of almost all large and important achievement which tend to obscure and suppress a sense of justice. Think of all that a great patriot must condone in his supporters, during a death- struggle with a mighty foe. One shudders to imagine all that must have been permitted, for instance, by a William the Silent. And any strong sympathy tends towards the same result. We remember the late Archdeacon Hare speaking of a distinguished contemporary, Bishop Thirlwall, as affording an instance of a perfectly balanced mind ;—of a perfect exhibition, that is, of the intellectual side of justice. "What an happy disposition !" exclaimed his hearer. "You are quite mistaken," replied he ; "the person whom it characterises will never see quite enough reason for action." Does not that weighty sentence involve a warning against the expectation to find justice in the actions of great men This is eminently a case where the ex- ception proves the rule. No reader will forget the thrill with which he learned that the solitary vote which would have saved. the Athenian commanders at Arginusal from the generous, though unjust indignation roused by their desertion of their drowning countrymen, was that of Socrates. But as you unfold the long roll of history, how many instances of a similar temperance could you set by the side of the great philosopher's single emergence into the world of politics P History displays instances of every other virtue a hundred times, for once that she gives us a glimpse of this one. Politi- cians are not necessarily unjust. We can fancy that the actual result of the temporary suppression of justice, while it would cause in some minds an actual Blackening of a feeling that was often suppressed, in others would tend towards intensifying it. In some parts of Burke's mind this quality seems to us, if such a thing be possible, to take almost morbid dimensions ; this does not seem too much to say, for instance, of his well-justified boast that no individual had ever been forced by his economic reforms into so much privation as the omission of a dish from his table. But no doubt, in many cases strong party feeling leaks, as it were, into the non-political part of the character, and spoils the sense of justice everywhere ; and which result will be most frequent, we do not undertake to say.

But the chief reason for an inadequate conception of justice is the fact that it is almost never made successfully an aim of action. We do not say that men never, or even rarely, aim al it. We do not say that they never achieve it, though we have allowed that no other virtue is so rare. But rare as it is to meet with justice, it is far, far rarer to meet with justice in one who has made it his aim to be just. Almost every one, we suppose, has at least once in his life felt that he came in contact with a just mind,—that his shortcomings were estimated with- out exaggeration, hie offences visited with no more than their merited penalty. If he ask himself what hand has adminis- tered this tonic to fainting self-esteem, this anodyne to the But- teriugs of a restless vanity, he will invariably find, we believe, that it was that of one whose ideal was something different from justice. We do not believe that any human being ever im- pressed another with the sense of justice, in the face of any real difficulty or obstacle who was otherwise than boundlessly for- giving. The man in whom each of two enemies recognises a delicate and accurate discernment of his own difficulties and his

own claims, must be one who, in theylace of either, could pardon

the other for the difficulties he causes and the unreasonable claims he makes. We can judge no offence we could. not forgive. To the merely logical intellect, no doubt, the ideas of forgiveness and of justice appear utterly incongruous; but the verdict of experience, we are convinced, will prepare us to accept a close connection be- tween the capacity to put aside injury to self, and the capacity to judge of injuries to others. It is not the mere subtraction of self-interest that will make us just. We need a positive prin- ciple of disinterestedness,—we need the spirit filet in its active manifestations we call self-sacrifice, before we mu quit our own moral atmosphere and enter into that of another, so far as to measure his needs and his failures. If these words appear extravagant, we believe it is because hardly any one knows

-what it is to make the effort. This moral transplantation forms ma part of that which a man ordinarily attempts, when he sets 'himself to be just to another.

Not, we would emphatically protest, that generosity is a 'larger thing than justice. He who has been truly just to :another has gone through a process as much more arduous than one who has been generous, as it is harder to write out a prescription for an invalid than to pour out a glass of wine for him. But no one will fulfil the office of the moral physician who aims at justice to the moral invalid. We shall not see truly what our fellow-man is, if this is all we try to see. We 'cannot be more than just to him, his need is justice; but we must aim at something else, if we are to supply this. Who has not felt, when charged with some ugly motive, as if a hideous mask were fixed upon his face which he is powerless to remove P He would not feel this if the charge were false. He would not feel it either, if the charge were just. The paradox that, being true, it may also be most unjust, however unanswerable by logic, is -solved everyday by experience. To judge our fellow-man, we need to know not only his conduct, but his aims. The ugly reproach him may be a serpent

motive with which you which he is striving to trample under foot, while you identify it with himself. And only he can discern this struggle who has once for all taken part with the good in every man against the evil which in every man is so much more obvious. If justice is to be recognised by the judged, the judge must be not a mere reporter of existing conditions, but one who contemplates evil that he may be enabled to heal it.

A connection between the higher justice of modern life and a theology incorporating this ideal of redemption in the object of -worship will not, we presume, be disputed by any one, what- ever he may thiuk of the limitations with which this ideal 'has been hampered. The purer morality evolved in the process of ages produced, according to one set of thinkers, that belief • in a God who came to seek and to save what was lost which, according to the opposite view, was itself the source of that higher justice, or which, at all -events, had a common cause with it. At any rate, we presume -no one will deny that the Englishman at his best is more just than the Greek was at his best. Justice, to an Englishman, means attention to the claims of everybody. Justice, to an Athenian, meant attention to the claims of a portion of those whom we should call Athenians, for certainly we should include Athenian slaves in the title. We do not deny that with this narrowing of the subjects of claim -there was a certain intensifying sof the claim itself, but we deny most strongly that this intensifying was in the direc- tion of what we mean by justice. To prove or illustrate such an assertion would take a volume ; we leave it here, with the certainty that no instructed mind will differ from it in any .other sense than that he may think we have not put it into the best words. The Greek at his best would reward the good man and punish the bad man, irrespective of any temptation to do otherwise. That was at least his ideal of life. The English- man at his best would reward the good and reclaim the bad. And English justice, accordingly, is more just than Greek jus- tice. Including within our moral ideal what we may call the supernatural half of virtue, we have attained a certain elevation in: its natural portion which is, we believe, inaccessible to those who see no lofty mountain-peaks beyond it. The wonderful difficulty of giving each man that which he deserves is over- come only when we bridge, by what it is no exaggeration to -call a moral miracle, the gulf between his consciousness and our own, and read his struggles by the light of our large aims and our miserable achievements. If ever we have been tempted to estimate the merits of another apart from this element, we have surely been taught—unless judge and judged alike belong to a singularly gracious and favoured moral class—how strangely misleading an atmosphere settles down between man and man, the moment they confront each other, as separate, isolated beings, not linked by any special sympathy. The bonds of special sympathy have been, it may appear, sources as much of injus- tice as of justice. But that which is to replace them must em- body their strength, without their narrowness. It must, we be- lieve, consist in a relation between humanity and something beyond itself.

We are told that, with the subtraction of the supernatural element from life, justice will take new proportions in our moral ideal. We fully believe it. It is difficult to imagine to oneself the new moral world that will arise when that which

has been moulded on Christianity—or, if our opponen ts please, (for the result is the same, for our present purpose) that which has moulded Christianity—has passed away ; but this we fully expect, that it will be far more distinctly the deliberate aim of every upright and conscientious person to be just. To every Christian, some echo of the voice that bid his followers renounce the cloak when the coat was taken from them has been a dis- turbing influence in this ideal,—an influence not often consciously accepted, perhaps, in practice, and most rarely dis- cernible there, but still never without influence on the Christian theory of a right life. Portia's appeal :--

"Though justice be thy plea, consider this, That in the course of justice none of us Shall see salvation," —though we think the argument as an address to a Jew, a striking instance of the insolent prejudice against his race, which

Shakespeare was flattering in the whole play, may still be cited as a specimen of the influence of Christianity on our ideals. True, it is the persecutor who speaks, when for a moment the persecuted has power. Alas, it is thus that almost all moral ideals arc seen most clearly ! One of the race which has roused revenge by atrocious justice can see that something more than justice (in the narrow, external sense) is demanded, the moment that its own interests are imperilled. It is with a profound truth to human nature that the great dramatist has allowed, at this moment, a theological dogma to intermingle with human passion, though we confess that we think itis also with a certain concession to what is lowest in human nature. But we cite the passage as an instance of the influence which has been to the Christian world the very atmosphere of moral feeling. We could no more help being moulded by it, than we could help being affected by our climate. We see traces of this influence in those who have repudiated its intellectual justification with all the energy of their being. We have all seen men willing to taste of death for every man, though they had long ceased to believe in a God who had set them the example, but it is difficult to estimate the condition of the moral world when the influence of this example is wholly withdrawn. It is almost impossible at this moment, but it will not long continue so, if the present movement of thought is unchecked. Already, as we have allowed, we do catch glimpses of the ideal of the future. When we are told that its basis will be a stricter and more exact attention to equity, the information does not wholly lack support in experience. We do see, here and there, as the Christian influence has died away from conscientious minds, that this has more aml more become the goal of moral effort. If the foregoing considerations have any cogency, it will not be thought a paradox to assert that, as the aim becomes general, it will less and less be fulfilled. If frail and fallible human beings need an infinite background of ideal mercy for one achievement of actual justice, we may well lament, in the interests of justice, that men should aim at being just.