eral lot of
mankind, in ideal works, exists, multiplied world-wide in the lives and
fortunes of mankind, an inestimable amount of injustice always
present. The sacrifice of innocence is in no way lessened by aught of
vengeance that may overtake the wrong-doer; and it is constant. The
murdered man, the wronged woman, can find no reparation. What shall one
say of the sufferings of children and of the old, and of the great curse
that lies in heredity and the circumstances of early life under
depraved, ignorant, or malicious conditions? These brutalities, like the
primeval struggle in the rise of life, seem in a world that never heard
the name of justice. The main seat of individual justice and its
operation is, after all, in the moral sense of men, governing their own
conduct and modifying so far as possible the mass of injustice
continually arising in the process of life, by such relief as they can
give by personal influence and action both on persons and in the realm
of moral opinion.

But, such questions apart, and within the reach of the rude power of the
law over men in the mass, where individuality may be neglected, there
remains that portion of the field in which the cause of justice may be
advanced, as it was in the extinction of slavery, the confiscation of
the French lands, the abolition of the poor debtor laws, and in similar
great measures of class legislation, if you will. I confess I am one of
those who hold that society is largely responsible even for crime and
pauperism, and especially other less clearly defined conditions in the
community by which there exists an inveterate injustice ingrained in the
structure of society itself. The process of freeing man from the fetters
of the past is still incomplete, and democracy is a faith still early in
its manifestation; social justice is the cry under which this progress
is made, and, being grounded in material conditions and hot with men's
passions under wrong, it is a dangerous cry, and unheeded it becomes
revolutionary; but in what has democracy been so beneficent to society
as in the ways without number that it has opened for the doing of
justice to men in masses, for the moulding of safe and orderly methods
of change, and for the formation as a part of human character of a habit
of philanthropy to those especially whose misfortunes may be partly laid
to the door of society itself? Charity, great as it is, can but
alleviate, it cannot upon any scale cure pover