enefits it may also confer are
only further examples of her nice equilibrium and necessary harmony. For
it lies in the essence of a mechanical world, where the interests of its
products are concerned, to be fundamentally kind, since it has formed
and on the whole maintains those products, and yet continually cruel,
since it forms and maintains them blindly, without considering
difficulties or probable failures. Now the most tyrannical government,
like the best, is a natural product maintained by an equilibrium of
natural forces. It is simply a new mode of mechanical energy to which
the philosopher living under it must adjust himself as he would to the
weather. But when the vehicle of nature's inclemency is a heartless man,
even if the harm done be less, it puts on a new and a moral aspect. The
source of injury is then not only natural but criminal as well, and the
result is a sense of wrong added to misfortune. It must needs be that
offence come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh. He justly
arouses indignation and endures remorse.

[Sidenote: Conditions of a just inequality.]

Now civilisation cannot afford to entangle its ideals with the causes of
remorse and of just indignation. In the first place nature in her slow
and ponderous way levels her processes and rubs off her sharp edges by
perpetual friction. Where there is maladjustment there is no permanent
physical stability. Therefore the ideal of society can never involve the
infliction of injury on anybody for any purpose. Such an ideal would
propose for a goal something out of equilibrium, a society which even if
established could not maintain itself; but an ideal life must not tend
to destroy its ideal by abolishing its own existence. In the second
place, it is impossible on moral grounds that injustice should subsist
in the ideal. The ideal means the perfect, and a supposed ideal in which
wrong still subsisted would be the denial of perfection. The ideal state
and the ideal universe should be a family where all are not equal, but
where all are happy. So that an aristocratic or theistic system in order
to deserve respect must discard its sinister apologies for evil and
clearly propose such an order of existences, one superposed upon the
other, as should involve no suffering on any of its levels. The
services required of each must involve no injury to any; to perform them
should be made the servant's spontaneous and specific ideal. The
privileges the syste