re
strange lovers of an ideal justice, we are strange judges! A judicial
error sends a thrill of horror from one end of the world to another;
but the error which condemns three-fourths of mankind to misery, an
error as purely human as that of any tribunal, is attributed by us to
some inaccessible, implacable power. If the child of some honest man
we know be born blind, imbecile, or deformed, we will seek everywhere,
even in the darkness of a religion we have ceased to practise, for some
God whose intention to question; but if the child be born poor--a
calamity, as a rule, no less capable than the gravest infirmity of
degrading a creature's destiny--we do not dream of interrogating the
God who is wherever we are, since he is made of our own desires.
Before we demand an ideal judge, we shall do well to purify our ideas,
for whatever blemish there is in these will surely be in the judge.
Before we complain of Nature's indifference, or ask at her hands an
equity she does not possess, let us attack the iniquity that dwells in
the homes of men; and when this has been swept away, we shall find that
the part we assign to the injustice of fate will be less by fully
two-thirds. And the benefit to mankind would be far more considerable
than if it lay in our power to guide the storm or govern the heat and
the cold, to direct the course of disease or the avalanche, or contrive
that the sea should display an intelligent regard to our virtues and
secret intentions. For indeed the poor far exceed in number those who
fall victims to shipwreck or material accident, just as far more
disease is due to material wretchedness than to the caprice of our
organism, or to the hostility of the elements.

11

And for all that, we love justice. We live, it is true, in the midst
of a great injustice; but we have only recently acquired this
knowledge, and we still grope for a remedy. Injustice dates such a
long way back; the idea of God, of destiny, of Nature's mysterious
decrees, had been so closely and intimately associated with it, it is
still so deeply entangled with most of the unjust forces of the
universe, that it was but yesterday that we commenced the endeavour to
isolate such elements contained within it as are purely human. And if
we succeed; if we can distinguish them, and separate them for all time
from those upon which we have no power, justice will gain more than by
all that the researches of man have discovered hitherto. Fo