t, 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?

28

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 dista