necessity of
maintaining that there can be laudable injustice.

The considerations which have now been adduced resolve, I conceive, the
only real difficulty in the utilitarian theory of morals. It has always
been evident that all cases of justice are also cases of expediency: the
difference is in the peculiar sentiment which attaches to the former, as
contradistinguished from the latter. If this characteristic sentiment
has been sufficiently accounted for; if there is no necessity to assume
for it any peculiarity of origin; if it is simply the natural feeling of
resentment, moralized by being made coextensive with the demands of
social good; and if this feeling not only does but ought to exist in all
the classes of cases to which the idea of justice corresponds; that idea
no longer presents itself as a stumbling-block to the utilitarian
ethics. Justice remains the appropriate name for certain social
utilities which are vastly more important, and therefore more absolute
and imperative, than any others are as a class (though not more so than
others may be in particular cases); and which, therefore, ought to be,
as well as naturally are, guarded by a sentiment not only different in
degree, but also in kind; distinguished from the milder feeling which
attaches to the mere idea of promoting human pleasure or convenience, at
once by the more definite nature of its commands, and by the sterner
character of its sanctions.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: See this point enforced and illustrated by Professor Bain,
in an admirable chapter (entitled "The Ethical Emotions, or the Moral
Sense") of the second of the two treatises composing his elaborate and
profound work on the Mind.]

[Footnote D: This implication, in the first principle of the utilitarian
scheme, of perfect impartiality between persons, is regarded by Mr.
Herbert Spencer (in his _Social Statics_) as a disproof of the
pretentions of utility to be a sufficient guide to right; since (he
says) the principle of utility presupposes the anterior principle, that
everybody has an equal right to happiness. It may be more correctly
described as supposing that equal amounts of happiness are equally
desirable, whether felt by the same or by different persons. This,
however, is not a pre-supposition; not a premise needful to support the
principle of utility, but the very principle itself; for what is the
principle of utility, if it be not that 'happiness' and 'desirabl