Chapter I: The Mystery of Justice (2)

We have seen in the preceding chapters that Nature does not appear to be just from our point of view; but we have absolutely no means of judging whether she be not just from her own. The fact that she pays no heed to the morality of our actions does not warrant the inference that she has no morality, or that ours is the only one there can be. We are entitled to say that she is indifferent as to whether our intentions be good or evil, but have not the right to conclude that she has therefore no morality and no equity; for that would be tantamount to affirming that there are no more mysteries or secrets, and that we know all the laws of the universe, its origin and its end. Her mode of action is different from our own, but, I say it once more, we know not what her reason may be for acting in this different fashion; and we have no right to imitate what seems to us iniquitous and cruel, so long as we have no precise knowledge of the profound and salutary reasons that may underlie such action. What is the aim of Nature? Whither do the worlds tend that stretch across eternity? Where does consciousness begin, and is its only form that which it assumes in ourselves? At what point do physical laws become moral laws? Is life unintelligent? Have we sounded all the depths of Nature, and is it only in our cerebro-spinal system that she becomes mind? And finally, what is justice when viewed from other heights? Is the intention necessarily at its centre; and can no regions exist where intentions no longer shall count? We should have to answer these questions, and many others, before we could tell whether Nature be just or unjust from the point of view of masses whose vastness corresponds to her own. She disposes of a future, a space, of which we can form no conception; and in these there exists, it may be, a justice proportioned to her duration, to her extent and aim, even as our own instinct of justice is proportioned to the duration and narrow circle of our own life. The wrong that she may for centuries commit she has centuries wherein to repair; but we, who have only a few days before us, what right have we to imitate what our eye cannot see, understand, or follow? By what standard are we to judge her, if we look away from the passing hour? For instance, considering only the imperceptible speck that we form in the worlds, and disregarding the immensity that surrounds us, we are wholly ignorant of all that concerns our possible life beyond the tomb; and we forget that, in the present state of our knowledge, nothing authorises us to affirm that there may not be a kind of more or less conscious, more or less responsible after-life, that shall in no way depend on the decisions of an external will. He would indeed be rash who should venture to maintain that nothing survives, either in us or in others, of the efforts of our good intentions and the acquirements of our mind. It may be--and serious experiments, though they do not seem to prove the phenomenon, may still allow us to class it among scientific possibilities--it may be that a part of our personality, of our nervous force, may escape dissolution. How vast a future would then be thrown open to the laws that unite cause to effect, and that always end by creating justice when they come into contact with the human soul, and have centuries before them! Let us not forget that Nature at least is logical, even though we call her unjust; and were we to resolve on injustice, our difficulty would be that we must also be logical; and when logic comes into touch with our thoughts and our feelings, our intentions and passions, what is there that differentiates it from justice?

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Let us form no too hasty conclusion; too many points are still uncertain. Should we seek to imitate what we term the injustice of Nature, we would run the risk of imitating and fostering only the injustice that is in ourselves. When we say that Nature is unjust, we are in effect complaining of her indifference to our own little virtues, our own little intentions, our own little deeds of heroism; and it is our vanity, far more than our sense of equity, that considers itself aggrieved. Our morality is proportioned to our stature and our restricted destiny; nor have we the right to forsake it because it is not on the scale of the immensity and infinite destiny of the universe.

And further, should it even be proved that Nature is unjust at all points, the other question remains intact: whether the command be laid upon man to follow Nature in her injustice. Here we shall do well to let our own consciousness speak, rather than listen to a voice so formidable that we hear not a word it utters, and are not even certain whether words there be. Reason and instinct tell us that it is right to follow the counsels of Nature; but they tell us also that we should not follow those counsels when they clash with another instinct within us, one that is no less profound: the instinct of the just and the unjust. And if instincts do indeed draw very near to the truth of Nature, and must be respected by us in the degree of the force that is in them, this one is perhaps the strongest of all, for it has struggled alone against all the others combined, and still persists within us. Nor is this the hour to reject it. Until other certitudes reach us, it behoves us, who are men, to continue just in the human way and the human sphere. We do not see far enough, or clearly enough, to be just in another sphere. Let us not venture into a kind of abyss, out of which races and peoples to come may perhaps find a passage, but whereinto man, in so far as he is man, must not seek to penetrate. The injustice of Nature ends by becoming justice for the race; she has time before her, she can wait, her injustice is of her girth. But for us it is too overwhelming, and our days are too few. Let us be satisfied that force should reign in the universe, but equity in our heart. Though the race be irresistibly, and perhaps justly, unjust, though even the crowd appear possessed of rights denied to the isolated man, and commit on occasions great, inevitable, and salutary crimes, it is still the duty of each individual of the race, of every member of the crowd, to remain just, while ever adding to and sustaining the consciousness within him. Nor shall we be entitled to abandon this duty till all the reasons of the great apparent injustice be known to us; and those that are given us now, preservation of the species, reproduction and selection of the strongest, ablest, "fittest," are not sufficient to warrant so frightful a change. Let each one try by all means to become the strongest, most skilful, the best adapted to the necessities of the life that he cannot transform; but, so far, the qualities that shall enable him to conquer, that shall give the fullest play to his moral power and his intelligence, and shall truly make him the happiest, most skilful, the strongest, and "fittest"--these qualities are precisely the ones that are the most human, the most honourable, and the most just.

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"Within me there is more," runs the fine device inscribed on the beams and pediment of an old patrician mansion at Bruges, which every traveller visits; filling a corner of one of those tender and melancholy quays, that are as forlorn and lifeless as though they existed only on canvas. And so too might man exclaim, "Within me there is more;" every law of morality, every intelligible mystery. There may be many others, above us and below us; but if these are to remain for ever unknown, they become for us as though they were not; and should their existence one day be revealed to us; it can only be because they already are in us, already are ours. "Within me there is more;" and we are entitled to add, perhaps, "I have nothing to fear from that which is in me."

This much at least is certain, that the one active, inhabited region of the mystery of justice is to be found within ourselves. Other regions lack consistency; they are probably imaginary, and must inevitably be deserted and sterile. They may have furnished mankind with illusions that served some purpose, but not always without doing harm; and though we may scarcely be entitled to demand that all illusions should be destroyed, they should at least not be too manifestly opposed to our conception of the universe. To-day we seek in all things the illusion of truth. It is not the last, perhaps, or the best, or the only one possible; but it is the one which we at present regard as the most honourable and the most necessary. Let us limit ourselves therefore to recognising the admirable love of justice and truth that exists in the heart of man. Proceeding thus, yielding admiration only where it is incontestably due, we shall gradually acquire some knowledge of this passion, which is the distinguishing note of man; and one thing, most important of all, we shall most undoubtedly learn--the means whereby we can purify it, and still further increase it. As we observe its incessant activity in the depths of our heart, the only temple where it can truly be active: as we watch it blending with all that we think, and feel, and do, we shall quickly discover which are the things that throw light upon it, and which those that plunge it in darkness; which are the things that guide it, and which those that lead it astray; we shall learn what nourishes it and what atrophies, what defends and what attacks.

Is justice no more than the human instinct of preservation and defence? Is it the purest product of our reason; or rather to be regarded as composed of a number of those sentimental forces which so often are right, though directly opposed to our reason--forces that in themselves are a kind of unconscious, vaster reason, to which our conscious reason invariably accords its startled approval when it has reached the heights whence those kindly feelings long had beheld what itself was unable to see? Is justice dependent on intellect, or rather on character? Questions, these, that are perhaps not idle if we indeed would know what steps we must take to invest with all its radiance and all its power the love of justice that is the central jewel of the human soul. All men love justice, but not with the same ardent, fierce, and exclusive love; nor have they all the same scruples, the same sensitiveness, or the same deep conviction. We meet people of highly developed intellect in whom the sense of what is just and unjust is yet infinitely less delicate, less clearly marked, than in others whose intellect would seem to be mediocre; for here a great part is played by that little-known, ill-defined side of ourselves that we term the character. And yet it is difficult to tell how much more or less unconscious intellect must of necessity go with the character that is unaffectedly honest. The point before us, however, is to learn how best to illumine, and increase within us, our desire for justice; and it is certain that, at the start, our character is less directly influenced by the desire for justice than is our intellect, the development of which this desire in a large measure controls; and the co-operation of the intellect, which recognises and encourages our good intention, is necessary for this intention to penetrate into, and mould, our character. That portion of our love of justice, therefore, which depends on our character, will benefit by its passage through the intellect; for in proportion as the intellect rises, and acquires enlightenment, will it succeed in mastering, enlightening, and transforming our instincts and our feelings.

But let us no longer believe that this love must be sought in a kind of superhuman, and often inhuman, infinite. None of the grandeur and beauty that this infinite may possess would fall to its portion; it would only be incoherent, inactive, and vague. Whereas by seeking it in ourselves, where it truly is; by observing it there, listening to it, marking how it profits by every acquirement of our mind, every joy and sorrow of our heart, we soon shall learn what we best had do to purify and increase it.

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Our task within these limits will be sufficiently long and mysterious. To increase and purify within us the desire for justice: how shall this thing be done? We have some vague conception of the ideal that we would approach; but how changeable still, and illusory, is this ideal! It is lessened by all that is still unknown to us in the universe, by all that we do not perceive or perceive incompletely, by all that we question too superficially. It is hedged round by the most insidious dangers; it falls victim to the strangest oblivion, the most inconceivable blunders. Of all our ideals it is the one that we should watch with the greatest care and anxiety, with the most passionate, pious eagerness and solicitude. What seems irreproachably just to us at the moment is probably the merest fraction of what would seem just could we shift our point of view. We need only compare what we were doing yesterday with what we do to-day; and what we do to-day would appear full of faults against equity, were it granted to us to rise still higher, and compare it with what we shall do to-morrow. There needs but a passing event, a thought that uses, a duty to ourselves that takes definite form, an unexpected responsibility that is suddenly made clear, for the whole organisation of our inward justice to totter and be transformed. Slow as our advance may have been, we still should find it impossible to begin life over again in the midst of many a sorrow whereof we were the involuntary cause, many a discouragement to which we unconsciously gave rise; and yet, when these things came into being around us, we appeared to be in the right, and did not consider ourselves unjust. And even so are we convinced to-day of our excellent intentions, even so do we tell ourselves that we are the cause if no suffering and no tears, that we stay not a murmur of happiness, shorten no moment of peace or of love; and it may be that there passes, unperceived of us, to our right or our left, an illimitable injustice that spreads over three-fourths of our life.

25

I chanced to-day to take up a copy of the "Arabian Nights," in the very remarkable translation recently published by Dr. Mardrus; and I marvelled at the extraordinary picture it gives of the ancient, long-vanished civilisations. Not in the Odyssey or the Bible, in Xenophon or Plutarch, could their teaching be more clearly set forth. There is one story that the Sultana Schahrazade tells--it is one of the very finest the volume contains--that reveals a life as pure and as admirable as mankind ever has known; a life replete with beauty, happiness, and love; spontaneous and vivid, intelligent, nourishing, and refined; an abundant life that, to a certain point, comes as near truth as a life well can. It is, in many respects, almost as perfect in its moral as in its material civilisation. And the pillars on which this incomparable structure of happiness rests--like pillars of light supporting the light--are formed of ideas of justice so exquisitely delicate, counsels of wisdom so deeply penetrating, that we of to-day, being less fine in grain, less eager and buoyant, have lost the power to formulate, or to discern, them. And for all that, this abode of felicity, that harbours a moral life so active and vigorous, so graciously grave, so noble--this palace, wherein the purest and holiest wisdom governs the pleasures of rejoicing mankind, is in its entirety based on so great an injustice, is enclosed by so vast, so profound, so frightful an iniquity, that the wretchedest man of us all would shrink in dismay from its glittering, gem-bestrewn threshold. But of this iniquity they who linger in that marvellous dwelling have not the remotest suspicion. It would seem that they never draw near to a window; or that, should one by some chance fly open and reveal to their sorrowful gaze the misery strewn in the midst of the revels and feasting, they still would be blind to the crime which was infinitely more revolting, infinitely more monstrous, than the most appalling poverty--the crime of the slavery, and the even more terrible degradation, of their women. For these, however exalted their position, and at the moment even when they are speaking to the men round about them of goodness and justice--when they are reminding them of their most touching and generous duties--these women never are more than objects of pleasure, to be bought or sold, or given away in a moment of gratitude, ostentation, or drunkenness, to any barbarous or hideous master.

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"They tell us," says the beautiful slave Nozhatan, as, concealed behind a curtain of silk and of pearls, she speaks to Prince Sharkan and the wise men of the kingdom; "they tell us that the Khalif Omar set forth one night, in the company of the venerable Aslam Abou-Zeid, and that he beheld, far away from his palace, a fire that was burning; and drew near, as he thought that his presence might perhaps be of service. And he saw a poor woman who was kindling wood underneath a cauldron; and by her side were two little wretched children, groaning most piteously. And Omar said, 'Peace unto thee, O woman! What dost thou here, alone in the night and the cold?' And she answered, 'Lord, I am making this water to boil, that my children may drink, who perish of hunger and cold; but for the misery we have to bear Allah will surely one day ask reckoning of Omar the Khalif.' And the Khalif, who was in disguise, was much moved, and he said to her, 'But dost thou think, O woman, that Omar can know of thy wretchedness, since he does not relieve it?' And she answered, 'Wherefore then is Omar the Khalif, if he be unaware of the misery of his people and of each one of his subjects?' Then the Khalif was silent, and he said to Aslam Abou-Zeid, 'Let us go quickly from hence.' And he hastened until he had reached the storehouse of his kitchens, and he entered therein and drew forth a sack of flour from the midst of the other sacks, and also a jar that was filled to the brim with sheep-fat, and he said to Abou-Zeid, 'O Abou-Zeid, help thou me to charge these on my back.' But Abou-Zeid refused, and he cried, 'Suffer that I carry them on my back, O Commander of the Faithful.' And Omar said calmly to him, 'Wilt thou also, O Abou-Zeid, bear the weight of my sins on the day of resurrection?' And Abou-Zeid was obliged to lay the jar filled with fat, and the sack of flour, on the Khalif's back. And Omar hastened, thus laden, until he had once again reached the poor woman; and he took of the flour, and he took of the fat, and placed these in the cauldron, over the fire; and with his own hands did he then get ready the food, and he quickened the fire with his breath; and as he bent over, his beard being long, the smoke from the wood forced its way through the beard of the Khalif. And at last, when the food was prepared, Omar offered it unto the woman and the two little children; and with his breath did he cool the food while they ate their fill. Then he left them the sack of flour and the jar of fat; and he went on his way, and said unto Aslam Abou-Zeid, 'O Abou-Zeid, the light from this fire I have seen to-day has enlightened me also.'"

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And it is thus that, a little further on, there speaks to a very wise king one of five pensive maidens whom this king is invited to purchase: "Know thou, O king," she says, "that the most beautiful deed one can do is the deed that is disinterested. And so do they tell us that in Israel once were two brothers, and that one asked the other, 'Of all the deeds thou hast done, which was the most wicked?' And his brother replied, 'This. As I passed a hen-roost one day, I stretched out my arm and I seized a chicken and strangled it, and then flung it back into the roost. That is the wickedest deed of my life. And thou, O my brother, what is thy wickedest action?' And he answered, 'That I prayed to Allah one day to demand a favour of him. For it is only when the soul is simply uplifted on high that prayer can be beautiful.'"

And one of her companions, captive and slave like herself, also speaks to the king: "Learn to know thyself," she says. "Learn to know thyself! And do thou not act till then. And do thou then only act in accordance with all thy desires, but having great care always that thou do not injure thy neighbour."

To this last formula our morality of today has nothing to add; nor can we conceive a precept that shall be more complete. At most we could widen somewhat the meaning of the word "neighbour," and raise, render somewhat more subtle and more elastic, that of the word "injure." And the book in which these words are found is a monument of horror, notwithstanding all its flowers and all its wisdom a monument of horror and blood and tears, of despotism and slavery. And they who pronounce these words are slaves. A merchant buys them I know not where, and sells them to some old hag who teaches them, or causes them to be taught, philosophy, poetry, all Eastern sciences, in order that one day they may become gifts worthy of a king. And when their education is finished, and their beauty and wisdom call forth the admiration of all who approach them, the industrious, prudent old woman does indeed offer them to a very wise, very just king. And when this very wise, very just king has taken their virginity from them, and seeks other loves, he will probably bestow them (I have forgotten the end of this particular story, but it is the invariable destiny of all the heroines of these marvellous legends) on his viziers. And these viziers will give them away in exchange for a vase of perfume or a belt studded with jewels; or perhaps despatch them to a distant country, there to conciliate a powerful protector, or a hideous, but dreaded, rival. And these women, so fully conscious of themselves, whose gaze can penetrate so deeply into the consciousness of others--these women who forever are pondering the loftiest, grandest problems of justice, of the morality of men and of nations--never throw one questioning glance on their fate, or for an instant suspect the abominable injustice whereof they are the victims. Nor do those suspect it either who listen to them, and love and admire them, and understand them. And we who marvel at this--we who also reflect on justice and virtue, on pity and love--are we so sure that they who come after us shall not some day find, in our present social condition, a spectacle no less disconcerting?

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It is difficult for us to imagine what the ideal justice will be, for every thought of ours that tends towards it is clogged by the injustice wherein we still live. Who shall say what new laws or relations will stand revealed when the misfortunes and inequalities due to the action of man shall have been swept away; when, in accordance with the principles of evolutionary morality, each individual shall "reap the results, good or bad, of his own nature, and of the consequences that ensue from that nature"? At present things happen otherwise; and we may unhesitatingly declare that, as far as the material condition of the vast bulk of mankind is concerned, the connection between conduct and consequences--to use Spencer's formula--exists only in the most ludicrous, arbitrary, and iniquitous fashion. Is there not some audacity in our imagining that our thoughts can possibly be just when the body of each one of us is steeped to the neck in injustice? And from this injustice no man is free, be it to his loss or his gain: there is not one whose efforts are not disproportionately rewarded, receiving too much or too little; not one who is not either advantaged or handicapped. And endeavour as we may to detach our mind from this inveterate injustice, this lingering trace of the sub-human morality needful for primitive races, it is idle to think that our thoughts can be as strenuous, independent, or clear as they might have been had the last vestige of this injustice disappeared; it is idle to think that they can achieve the same result. The side of the human mind that can attain a region loftier than reality is necessarily timid and hesitating. Human thought is capable of many things; it has, in the course of time, brought startling improvement to bear upon what seemed immutable in the species or the race. But even at the moment when it is pondering the transformation of which it has caught a distant glimpse, the improvement that it so eagerly desires, even then it is still thinking, feeling, seeing like the thing that it seeks to alter, even then it lies captive beneath the yoke. All its efforts notwithstanding, it is practically that which it would change. For the mind of man lacks the power to forecast the future; it has been formed rather to explain, judge, and co-ordinate that which was, to help, foster, and make known what already exists, but so far cannot be seen; and when it ventures into what is not yet, it will rarely produce anything very salutary or very enduring. And the influence of the social condition in which we exist lies heavy upon it. How can we frame a satisfactory idea of justice, and ponder it loyally, with the needful tranquillity, when injustice surrounds us on every side? Before we can study justice, or speak of it with advantage, it must become what it is capable of being: a social force, irreproachable and actual. At present all we can do is to invoke its unconscious, secret, and, as it were, almost imperceptible efforts. We contemplate it from the shores of human injustice; never yet has it been granted us to gaze on the open sea beneath the illimitable, inviolate sky of a conscience without reproach. If men had at least done all that it was possible for them to do in their own domain, they would then have the right to go further, and question elsewhere; and their thoughts would probably be clearer, were their consciences more at ease.

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And further, a heavy reproach lies on us and chills our ardour whenever we try to grow better, to increase our knowledge, our love, our forgiveness. Though we purify our consciousness and ennoble our thoughts, though we strive to render life softer and sweeter for those who are near us, all our efforts halt at our threshold, and have no influence on what lies outside our door; and the moment we leave our home we feel that we have done nothing, that there is nothing for us to do, and that we are taking part, ourselves notwithstanding, in the great anonymous injustice. Is it not almost ludicrous that we, who within our four walls strive to be noble and faithful, pitiful, simple and loyal; we whose consciousness balances the nicest, most delicate problems, and rejects even the suspicion of a bitter thought, have no sooner gone into the street and met faces that are unfamiliar, than, at that very instant, and without the least possibility of our having it otherwise, all pity, equity, love, should be completely ignored by us? What dignity, what loyalty, can there be in this double life, so wise and humane, uplifted and thoughtful, this side the threshold, and beyond it so callous, so instinctive and pitiless! For it is enough that we should feel the cold a little less than the labourer who passes by, that we should be better fed or clad than he, that we should buy any object that is not strictly indispensable, and we have unconsciously returned, through a thousand byways, to the ruthless act of primitive man despoiling his weaker brother. There is no single privilege we enjoy but close investigation will prove it to be the result of a perhaps very remote abuse of power, of an unknown violence or ruse of long ago; and all these we set in motion again as we sit at our table, stroll idly through the town, or lie at night in a bed that our own hands have not made. Nay, what is even the leisure that enables us to improve, to grow more compassionate and gentler, to think more fraternally of the injustice others endure--what is this, in truth, but the ripest fruit of the great injustice?

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These scruples, I know, must not be carried too far: they would either induce a spirit of useless revolt, possibly disastrous to the species whose mild and mighty sluggishness we are bound to respect; or they would lead us back to I know not what mystic, inert renouncement, directly opposed to the most evident and unchanging desires of life. Life has laws that we call inevitable; but we are already becoming more sparing in our use of the word. And here especially do we note the change that has come over the attitude of the wise and upright man. Marcus Aurelius--than whom perhaps none ever craved more earnestly for justice, or possessed a soul more wisely impressionable, more nobly sensitive--Marcus Aurelius never asked himself what might be happening outside that admirable little circle of light wherein his virtue and consciousness, his divine meekness and piety, had gathered those who were near him, his friends and his servants. Infinite iniquity, he knew full well, stretched around him on every side; but with this he had no concern. To him it seemed a thing that must be, a thing mysterious and sacred as the mighty ocean; the boundless domain of the gods, of fatality, of laws unknown and superior, irresistible, irresponsible, and eternal. It did not lessen his courage; on the contrary, it enhanced his confidence, his concentration, and spurred him upwards, like the flame that, confined to a narrow area, rises higher and higher, alone in the night, urged on by the darkness. He accepted the decree of fate, that allotted slavery to the bulk of mankind. Sorrowfully but with full conviction, did he submit to the irrevocable law; wherein he once again gave proof of his piety and his virtue. He retired into himself, and there, in a kind of sunless, motionless void, became still more just, still more humane. And in each succeeding century do we find a similar ardour, self-centred and solitary, among those who were wise and good. The name of more than one immovable law might change, but its infinite part remained ever the same; and each one regarded it with the like resigned and chastened melancholy. But we of to-day--what course are we to pursue? We know that iniquity is no longer necessary. We have invaded the region of the gods, of destiny, and unknown laws. These may still control disease or accident, perhaps, no less than the tempest, the lightning-flash, and most of the mysteries of death--we have not yet penetrated to them--but we are well aware that poverty, wretchedness, hopeless toil, slavery, famine, are completely outside their domain. It is we who organise these, we who maintain and distribute them. These frightful scourges, that have grown so familiar, are wielded by us alone; and belief in their superhuman origin is becoming rarer and rarer. The religious, impassable ocean, that excused and protected the retreat into himself of the sage and the man of good, now only exists as a vague recollection. To-day Marcus Aurelius could no longer say with the same serenity: "They go in search of refuges, of rural cottages, of mountains and the seashore; thou too art wont to cherish an eager desire for these things. But is this not the act of an ignorant, unskilled man, seeing that it is granted thee at whatever hour thou pleasest to retire within thyself? It is not possible for man to discover a retreat more tranquil, less disturbed by affairs, than that which he finds in his soul; especially if he have within him those things the contemplation of which suffices to procure immediate enjoyment of the perfect calm, which is no other, to my mind, than the perfect agreement of soul."

Other matters concern us to-day than this agreement of soul; or let us rather say that what we have to do is to bring into agreement there that from which the soul of Marcus Aurelius was free--three-fourths of the sorrows of mankind, in a word--which have become real to us, intelligible, human, and urgent, and are no longer regarded as the inexplicable, immutable, intangible decrees of fatality.

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This does not imply, however, that we should abandon the old sages' desire for "agreement"; and even though we may not be entitled to expect such perfect "agreement" as they derived from their pardonable egoism, we may still look for agreement of a provisional, conditional kind. And although such "agreement" be not the last word of morality, it is none the less indispensable that we should begin by being as just as we possibly can within ourselves and to those round about us, our neighbours, our friends, and our servants. It is at the moment when we have become absolutely just to these, and within our own consciousness, that we realise our great injustice to all the others. The method of being more practically just towards these last is not yet known to us; to return to great, heroic renouncements would effect but little, for these are incapable of unanimous action, and would probably run counter to the profoundest laws of nature, which rejects renouncement in every form save that of maternal love.

This practical justice, therefore, remains the secret of the race. Of such secrets it has many, which it reveals one by one, at such moments of history as become truly critical; and the solutions it offers to insuperable difficulties are almost always unexpected, and of strangest simplicity. The hour approaches, perhaps, when it will speak once more. Let us hope, without being too sanguine; for we must bear in mind that humanity has yet by no means emerged from the period of "sacrificed generations." History has known no others; and it is possible that, to the end of time, all generations may call themselves sacrificed. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the sacrifices, however unjust and useless they still may be, are growing ever less inhuman and less inevitable; and that the laws which govern them are becoming better and better known, and would seem to draw nearer and nearer to those that a lofty mind might accept without being pitiless.

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It must be admitted, however, that a majestic, redoubtable slowness attends the movements of these "ideas of the species." Centuries had to pass before it dawned upon primitive men, who fled from each other, or fought when they met at the mouth of their caverns, that they would do well to form into groups, and unite in defence against the mighty enemies who threatened them from without. And besides, these "ideas" of the species will often be widely different from those that the wisest man might hold. They would seem to be independent, spontaneous, often based on facts of which no trace is shown by the human reason of the epoch that witnessed their birth; and indeed there is no graver or more disturbing problem before the moralist or sociologist than that of determining whether all his efforts can hasten by one hour or divert by one hair's-breadth the decisions of the great anonymous mass which proceeds, step by step, towards its indiscernible goal.

Long ago--so long indeed that this is one of the first affirmations of science when, quitting the bowels of the earth, the glaciers and grottoes, it ceased to call itself geology and palaeontology and became the history of man--humanity passed through a crisis not wholly unlike that which now lies ahead of it, or is actually menacing it at the moment; the difference being only that in those days the dilemma seemed vastly more tragic and more unsolvable. It may truly be said that mankind never has known a more perilous or more decisive hour, or a period when it drew nearer its ruin; and the fact that we exist to-day would appear to be due to the unexpected expedient which saved the race at the moment when the scourge that fed on man's very reason, on all that was best and most irresistible in his instinct of justice and injustice, was actually on the point of destroying the heroic equilibrium between the desire to live and the possibility of living.

I refer to the acts of violence, rapine, outrage, murder, which were of natural occurrence among the earliest human groups. These crimes, which will probably have been of the most frightful description, must have very seriously endangered the existence of the race; for vengeance is the terrible, and, as it were, the epidemic form which the craving for justice at first assumes. Now this spirit of vengeance, abandoned to itself and forever multiplying--revenge followed by the revenge of revenge--would finally have engulfed, if not the whole of mankind, at least all those of the earliest men who were possessed of energy or pride. We find, however, that among these barbarous races, as among most of the existing savage tribes whose habits are known to us, there comes a time, usually at the period when their weapons are growing too deadly, when this vengeance suddenly halts before a singular custom, known as the "blood-tribute," or the "composition for murder;" which allows the homicide to escape the reprisals of the victim's friends and relations by payment to them of an indemnity, that, from being arbitrary at the start, soon becomes strictly graduated.

In the whole history of these infant races, in whom impulse and heroism were the predominant factors, there is nothing stranger, nothing more astounding, than this almost universal custom, which for all its ingenuity would seem almost too long-suffering and mercantile. May we attribute it to the foresight of the chiefs? We find it in races among whom authority might almost be said to be entirely lacking. Did it originate among the old men, the thinkers, the sages, of the primitive groups? That is not more probable. For underlying this custom there is a thought which is at the same time higher and lower than could be the thought of an isolated prophet or genius of those barbarous days. The sage, the prophet, the genius--above all, the untrained genius--is rather inclined to carry to extremes the generous and heroic tendencies of the clan or epoch to which he belongs. He would have recoiled in disgust from this timid, cunning evasion of a natural and sacred revenge, from this odious traffic in friendship, fidelity, and love. Nor is it conceivable, on the other hand, that he should have attained sufficient loftiness of spirit to be able to let his gaze travel beyond the noblest and most incontestable duties of the moment, and to behold only the superior interest of the tribe or the race: that mysterious desire for life, which the wisest of the wise among us to-day are generally unable to perceive or to justify until they have wrought grave and painful conquest over their isolated reason and their heart.

No, it was not the thought of man which found the solution. On the contrary, it was the unconsciousness of the mass, compelled to act in self-defence against thoughts too intrinsically, individually human to satisfy the irreducible exigencies of life on this earth. The species is extremely patient, extremely long-suffering. It will bear as long as it can and carry as far as it can the burden which reason, the desire for improvement, the imagination, the passions, vices, virtues, and feelings natural to man, may combine to impose upon it. But the moment the burden becomes too overwhelming, and disaster threatens, the species will instantaneously, with the utmost indifference, fling it aside. It is careless as to the means; it will adopt the one that is nearest, the simplest, most practical, being doubtless perfectly satisfied that its own idea is the justest and best. And of ideas it has only one, which is that it wishes to live; and truly this idea surpasses all the heroism, all the generous dreams, that may have reposed in the burden which it has discarded.

And indeed, in the history of human reason, the greatest and the justest thoughts are not always those which attain the loftiest heights. It happens somewhat with the thoughts of men as with a fountain; for it is only because the water has been imprisoned and escapes through a narrow opening that it soars so proudly into the air. As it issues from this opening and hurls itself towards the sky, it would seem to despise the great, illimitable, motionless lake that stretches out far beneath it. And yet, say what one will, it is the lake that is right. For all its apparent motionlessness, for all its silence, it is tranquilly accomplishing the immense and normal task of the most important element of our globe; and the jet of water is merely a curious incident, which soon returns into the universal scheme. To us the species is the great, unerring lake; and this even from the point of view of the superior human reason that it would seem at times to offend. Its idea is the vastest of all, and contains every other; it embraces limitless time and space. And does not each day that goes by reveal more and more clearly to us that the vastest idea, no matter where it reside, always ends by becoming the most just and most reasonable, the wisest and the most beautiful?

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There are times when we ask ourselves whether it might not be well for humanity that its destinies should be governed by the superior men among us, the great sages, rather than by the instinct of the species, that is always so slow and often so cruel.

It is doubtful whether this question could be answered to-day in quite the same fashion as formerly. It would surely have been highly dangerous to confide the destinies of the species to Plato or Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, or Montesquieu. At the very worst moments of the French Revolution the fate of the people was in the hands of philosophers of none too mean an order. It cannot be denied, however, that in our time the habits of the thinker have undergone a great change. He has ceased to be speculative or Utopian; he is no longer exclusively intuitive. In politics as in literature, in philosophy as in all the sciences, he displays less imagination, but his powers as an observer have grown. He inclines rather to concentrate his attention on the thing that is, to study it and strive at its organisation, than to precede it, or to endeavour to create what is not yet, or never shall be. And therefore he may possibly have some claim to more authoritative utterance; nor would so much danger attend his more direct intervention. It must be admitted, however, that there is no greater likelihood now than in former times of such intervention being permitted him. Nay, there is less, perhaps; for having become more circumspect and less blinded by narrow convictions, he will be less audacious, less imperious, and less impatient. And yet it is possible that, finding himself in natural sympathy with the species which he is content merely to observe, he will by slow degrees acquire more and more influence; so that here again, in ultimate analysis, it is the species that will be right, the species that will decide: for it will have guided him who observes it, and therefore, in following him whom it has guided, it will truly only be following its own unconscious, formless desires, which shall have been expressed by him, and by him brought into light.

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Until such time as the species shall discover the new and needful experiment--and this it will quickly do when the danger becomes more acute; nay, for all we know, the expedient may have already been found, and, entirely unsuspected of us, be already transforming part of our destinies--until such time, while bound to act in external matters as though our brothers' salvation depended entirely on our exertions, it is open to us, no less than to the sages of old, to retire occasionally within ourselves. We in our turn shall perhaps find there "one of those things" of which the contemplation shall suffice to bring us instantaneous enjoyment, if not of the perfect calm, at least of an indestructible hope. Though nature appear unjust, though nothing authorise us to declare that a superior power, or the intellect of the universe, rewards or punishes, here below or elsewhere, in accordance with the laws of our consciousness or with other laws that we shall some day admit; and, finally, though between man and man, in other words, in our relations with our fellows, our admirable desire for equity translate itself into a justice that is always incomplete, at the mercy of every error of reason, of every ambush laid by personal interest, and of all the evil habits of a social condition that still is sub-human, it is none the less certain that an image of that invisible and incorruptible justice, which we have vainly sought in the sky or the universe, reposes in the depths of the moral life of every man. And though its method of action be such as to cause it to pass unperceived of most of our fellows, often even of our own consciousness, though all that it does be hidden and intangible, it is none the less profoundly human and profoundly real. It would seem to hear, to examine, all that we say and think and strive for in our exterior life; and if it find a little sincerity beneath, a little earnest desire for good, it will transform these into moral forces that shall extend and illumine our inner life, and help us to better thoughts, better speech, better endeavour in the time to come. It will not add to, or take from, our wealth; it will bring no immunity from disease or from lightning; it will not prolong by one hour the life of the being we cherish; but if we have learned to reflect and to love, if, in other words, heart and brain have both done their duty, it will establish in heart and brain a contentment that, though perhaps stripped of illusion, shall still be inexhaustible and noble; it will confer a dignity of existence, and an intelligence, that shall suffice to sustain our life after the loss of our wealth, after the stroke of disease or of lightning has fallen, after the loved one has for ever quitted our arms. A good thought or deed brings a reward to our heart that it cannot, in the absence of an universal judge of nature, extend to the things around. It endeavours to create within us the happiness it is unable to produce in our material life. Denied all external outlet, it fills our soul the more. It prepares the space that soon shall be required by our developing intellect, our expanding peace and love. Helpless against the laws of nature, it is all-powerful over those that govern the happy equilibrium of human consciousness. And this is true of every stage of thought, of every class of action. A vast distance might seem to divide the labourer who brings up his children honourably, lives his humble life and honourably does the work that falls to his lot, from the man who steadfastly perseveres in moral heroism; but each of these is acting and living on the same plane as the other, and the same loyal, consoling region receives them both. And though it be certain that what we say and do must largely influence our material happiness, yet, in ultimate analysis, it is only by means of the spiritual organs that even material happiness can be fully and permanently enjoyed. Hence the preponderating importance of thought. But of supreme importance, from the point of view of the reception we shall offer to the joys and sorrows of life, is the character, the frame of mind, the moral condition, that the things we have said and done and thought will have created within us. Here is evidence of admirable justice; and the intimate happiness that our moral being derives from the constant striving of the mind and heart for good, becomes the more comprehensible when we realise that this happiness is only the surface of the goodly thought or feeling that is shining within our heart. Here may we indeed find that intelligent, moral bond between cause and effect that we have vainly sought in the external world; here, in moral matters, reigning over the good and evil that are warring in the depths of our consciousness, may we in truth discover a justice exactly similar to the one which we could desire to recognise in physical matters. But whence do we derive this desire if not from the justice within us; and is it not because this justice is so mighty and active in our heart that we are reluctant to believe in its non-existence in the universe?

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We have spoken at great length of justice; but is it not the great mystery of man, the one that tends to take the place of most of the spiritual mysteries that govern his destiny? It has dethroned more than one god, more than one nameless power. It is the star evolved from the nebulous mass of our instincts and our incomprehensible life. It is not the word of the enigma; and when, in the fulness of time, it shall become clearer to us, and shall truly reign all over the earth, there will come to us no greater knowledge of what we are, or why we are, whence we come or whither we go; but we shall at least have obeyed the first word of the enigma, and shall proceed, with a freer spirit and a more tranquil heart, to the search for its last secret.

Finally, it comprises all the human virtues; and none but itself can offer the welcoming smile whereby these are ennobled and purified, none but itself can accord them the right to penetrate deep into our moral life. For every virtue must be maleficent and steeped in artifice that cannot support the fixed and eager regard of justice. And so do we find it too at the heart of our every ideal. It is at the centre of our love of truth, at the centre of our love of beauty. It is kindness and pity, it is generosity, heroism, love; for all these are the acts of justice of one who has risen sufficiently high to perceive that justice and injustice are not exclusively confined to what lies before him, to the narrow circle of obligations chance may have imposed, but that they stretch far beyond years, beyond neighbouring destinies, beyond what he regards as his duty, beyond what he loves, beyond what he seeks and encounters, beyond what he approves or rejects, beyond his doubts and his fears, beyond the wrong-doing and even the crimes of the men, his brothers.