of equality, which is in some way connected with the demand for
justice, is not, of necessity, either unjust or impracticable. It
may be used to cover claims which are unjust, to sanction bare
confiscation, to take away motives for industry, and, briefly, may be a
demand of the drones to have an equal share of the honey. From the bare
abstract principle of equality between men, we can, in my own opinion,
deduce nothing; and, I do not think that the principle can itself be
established. That is why it is made a first principle, or, in other
words, one which is not to be discussed. The French revolutionists
treated it in this way as _à priori_ and self-evident. No school was in
more deadly opposition to such _à priori_ truths than the school of
Bentham and the utilitarians. Yet, Bentham's famous doctrine, that in
calculating happiness each man is to count for one, and nobody for more
than one, seems to be simply the old principle in a new disguise. James
Mill applied the doctrine to politics. J. S. Mill again applied it,
with still more thoroughness, especially in his doctrine of
representation and of the equality of the sexes. Accordingly, various
moralists have urged that this was an inconsistency in utilitarian
doctrine, implying that they, too, could make _à priori_ first
principles when they wanted them. It has become a sort of orthodox
dogma with radicals, who do not always trouble themselves about a
philosophical basis, and is applied with undoubting confidence to many
practical political problems. "One man, one vote" is not simply the
formulation of a demand, but seems to intimate a logical ground for the
demand. If, in politics, one man is rightfully entitled to one vote, is
it not also true that, in economics, one man should have a right to one
income, or, that money, like political power, should be distributed
into precisely equal shares? Yet, why are we to take for granted the
equality of men in the sense required for such deductions? Since men
are not equally qualified for political power, it would seem better
_primâ facie_ that each man should have the share of power and
wealth which corresponds to his powers of using, or, perhaps, to his
powers of enjoying. Why should we not say, "To each man according to
his deserts"? One practical reason, of course, is the extreme
difficulty of saying what are the deserts, and how they are to be
ascertained. Undoubtedly, equality is the shortest and simplest way
but, if we take it merely as the most convenient assumption, it loses
its attractive appearance of abstract justice or _à priori_
self-certainty. Do a common labourer and Mr. Gladstone deserve the same
share of voting power? If not, how many votes should Mr. Gladstone
possess to give him his just influence? To ask such questions is to
show that answering is impossible, though political theorists have, now
and then, tried to put together some ostensible pretext for an answer.
What, let us ask, is the true relation between justice and equality? A
judge, to take the typical case, is perfectly just when he ascertains
the facts by logical inferences from the evidence, and then applies the
law in the spirit of a scientific reasoner. Given the facts, what is
the rule under which they come? To answer that question, generally
speaking, is his whole duty. In other words, he has to exclude all
irrelevant considerations, such as his own private interests or
affections. The parties are to be to him merely A and B, and he has to
work out the result as an arithmetician works out a sum. Among the
irrelevant considerations are frequently some moral aspects of the
case. A judge, for example, decides a will to be valid or invalid
without asking whether the testator acted justly or unjustly in a moral
sense, but simply whether his action was legal or illegal. He cannot go
behind the law, even from motives of benevolence or general maxims of
justice, without being an unjust judge. Cases may arise, indeed, as I
must say in passing, in which this is hardly true. A law may be so
flagrantly unjust that a virtuous judge would refuse to administer it.
One striking case was that of the fugitive slave law in the United
States, where a man had to choose between acting legally and outraging
humanity. So we consider a parent unjust who does not leave his fortune
equally among his children. Unless there should be some special reason
to the contrary, we shall hold him to be unfair for making distinctions
out of mere preference of one child to another. Yet in the case of
primogeniture our opinion would have to be modified. Supposing, for
example, a state of society in which primogeniture was generally
recognised as desirable for public interests, we could hardly call a
man unjust for leaving his estates to his eldest son. If, in such a
state, a man breaks the general rule, our judgment of his conduct would
be determined perhaps by considering whether he was before or behind
his age, whether he was acting from a keener perception of the evils of
inequality or actuated by spite or regardless of the public interests
which he believed to be concerned. A parent treats his children equally
in his will in regard to money; but he does not, unless he is a fool,
give the same training or the same opening to all his children, whether
they are stupid or clever, industrious or idle. But what I wish to
insist upon is, that justice implies essentially indifference to
irrelevant considerations, and therefore, in many cases, equality in
the treatment of the persons concerned. A judge has to decide without
reference to bribes, and not be biassed by the position of an accused
person. In that sense he treats the men equally, but of course he does
not give equal treatment to the criminal and innocent, to the rightful
and wrongful claimant.
The equality implied in justice is therefore to be understood as an
exclusion of the irrelevant, and thus supposes an understanding as to
what is irrelevant. It is not a mere abstract assertion of equality;
but the assertion that, in a given concrete case, a certain rule is to
be applied without considering anything outside of the rule. An ideally
perfect rule would contain within itself a sufficient indication of
what is to be relevant. All men of full age, sound mind, and so forth,
are to be treated in such and such a way. Then all cases falling within
the rule are to be decided on the same principles, and in that sense
equally. But the problem remains, what considerations should be taken
into account by the rule itself? Let us put the canon of equality in a
different shape, namely, that there should always be a sufficient
reason for any difference in the treatment of our fellows. This rule
does not imply that I should act in all cases as though all men were
equal in character or mind, but that my action should in all cases be
justified by some appropriate consideration. It does not prove that
every man should have a vote, but that if one man has a vote and
another has not, there should be some adequate reason for the
difference. It does not prove that every man should work eight hours a
day and have a shilling an hour; but that differences of hours or of
pay and, equally, uniformity of hours and pay, should have some
sufficient justification. This is a deeper principle, which in some
cases justifies and in others does not justify the rule of equality.
The rule of equality follows from it under certain conditions, and has
gained credit because, in point of fact, those conditions have often
been satisfied.
The revolutionary demand for equality was, historically speaking, a
protest against arbitrary inequality. It was a protest against the
existence of privileges accompanied by no duties. When the rich man
could only answer the question, "What have you done to justify your
position?" by the famous phrase of Beaumarchais, "I took the trouble to
be born," he was obviously in a false position. The demand for a
society founded upon reason, in this sense that a sufficient reason
should be given for all differences, was, it seems to me, perfectly
right; and, moreover, was enough to condemn the then established
system. But when this demand has been so constructed as to twist a
logical rule, applicable to all scientific reasoning, into a dogmatic
assertion that certain concrete beings were in fact equal, and to infer
that they should have equal rights, it ceased to be logical at all, and
has been a fruitful parent of many fallacies. Reasonable beings require
a sufficient reason for all differences of conduct, for the difference
between their treatment of a man and a monkey or a white man and a
black, as well as for differences between treatment of rich and poor or
wise men and fools; and there must, as the same principle implies, be
also a sufficient reason for treating all members of a given class
equally. We have to consider whether, for any given purpose, the
differences between human beings and animals, Englishmen and negroes,
men and women, are or are not of importance for our purpose. When the
differences are irrelevant we neglect them or admit the claim to
equality of treatment. But the question as to relevance is not to be
taken for granted either way. It would be a very convenient but a very
unjustifiable assumption in many cases, as it might save an astronomer
trouble if he assumed that every star was equal to every other star.
The application of this is, I think, obvious. The _â priori_
assumption of the equality of men is, in some sense, easily refuted.
But the refutation does not entitle us to assume that arbitrary
inequality, inequality for which no adequate ground can be assigned, is
therefore justifiable. It merely shows that the problem is more complex
than has been assumed at first sight. "All men ought to be equal." If
you mean equal in natural capacity or character, it is enough to say
that what is impossible cannot be. If you propose that the industrious
and idle, the good and bad, the wise and foolish, should share equally
in social advantages, the reply is equally obvious, that such a scheme,
if possible, would be injurious to the qualities on which human welfare
depends. If you say that men should be rewarded solely according to
their intrinsic merits, we must ask, do you mean to abstract from the
adventitious advantages of education, social surroundings, and so
forth, or to take men as they actually are, whatever the circumstances
to which their development is owing? To ask what a man would have been
had he been in a different position from his youth, is to ask for an
impossible solution, and one, moreover, of no practical bearing. I
shall not employ a drunkard if I am in want of a butler, whether he has
become a drunkard under overpowering temptation or become a drunkard
from inherited dipsomania. But if, on the other hand, I take the man
for what he is, without asking how he has come to be what he is, I
leave the source at least of all the vast inequalities of which we
complain. The difficulty, which I will not try to develop further,
underlies, as I think, the really vital difference of method by which
different schools attempt to answer the appeal for social justice.
The school of so-called individualists finds, in fact, that equality in
their sense is incompatible with the varied differences due to the
complete growth of the social structure. They look upon men simply as
so many independent units of varying qualities, no doubt, but still
capable of being considered for political and social purposes as equal.
They ask virtually what justice would demand if we had before us a
crowd of independent applicants for the good things of the world, and
the simplest answer is to distribute the good things equally. If it is
replied that the idle and the industrious should not be upon the same
footing, they are ready to agree, perhaps, that men should be rewarded
according to their services to society, however difficult it may be to
arrange the proportions. But it soon appears that the various classes
into which society is actually divided imply differences not due to the
individual and his intrinsic merits, but to the varying surroundings in
which he is placed. To do justice, then, it becomes necessary to get
rid of these differences. The extreme case is that of the family. Every
one probably owes more to his mother and to his early domestic
environment than to any other of the circumstances which have
influenced his development. If you and I started as perfectly equal
babies, and you have become a saint and I a sinner, the divergence
probably began when our mothers watched our cradles, and was made
inevitable before we had left their knees. Consequently, the more
thorough-going designers of Utopia have proposed to abolish this
awkward difference. Men must be different at their birth; but we might
conceivably arrange public nurseries which should place them all under
approximately equal conditions. Then any differences would result from
a man's intrinsic qualities, and he might be said to be rewarded simply
according to his own merits.
The plan may be tempting, but has its disadvantages. There are
injustices, if we call all inequality injustice, which we can only
attribute to nature or to the unknown power which makes men and
monkeys, Shakespeares and Stephens. And one result is that the
character and conduct of human beings depend to a great extent upon
circumstances, which are accidental in the sense that they are
circumstances other than the original endowment of the individual. In
this sense, maternal love, for example, is unjust. The mother loves her
child because it is her own, not because it is better (though of course
it is better) than other children. So, as Adam Smith, I think,
observed, we are more moved by our neighbour's suffering from a corn on
his great toe than by the starvation of millions in China. In other
words, the affections, which are the great moving forces of society,
are unjust in so far as they cause us to be infinitely more interested
in our own little circle than in the remoter members of humanity known
to us only by report. Without discussing the "justice" of this
arrangement, we shall have, I think, to admit that it is inevitable.
For I, at least, hold that the vague and vast organism of humanity
depends for its cohesion upon the affinities and attractions, and not
_vice versâ_. My interests are strongest where my power of action
is greatest. The love of mothers for children is a force of essential
value, and therefore to be cultivated rather than repressed, for no
force known to us could replace it. And what is pre-eminently true in
this case is, of course, true to a degree in others. Burke stated this
with admirable force in his attack upon the revolutionists who
expounded the opposite principle of abstract equality. "To be attached
to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society,
is the first principle," he says, "the germ, as it were, of public
affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed
towards a love to our country and mankind." The assertion that they
desired to invert this order, to destroy every social link in so far as
it tended to produce inequalities, was the pith of his great indictment
against the French "metaphysical" revolutionists. They had perverted
the general logical precept of the sufficient reason for all
inequalities by converting it into an assuming of the equality of
concrete units. They fell into the fallacy of which I have spoken; and
many radicals, utilitarians, and others have followed them. They
assumed that all the varieties of human character, or all those due to
the influence of the social environment, through whose structure and
inherited instincts every full-grown man has been moulded, might be
safely disregarded for the purpose of political and social
construction. They have spoken, in brief, as if men were the equal and
homogeneous atoms of physical inquiry and social problems capable of
solution by a simple rearrangement of the atoms in different orders,
instead of remembering that they are dealing with a complex organism,
in which not only the whole order but every constituent atom is also a
complex structure of indefinitely varying qualities. In the recognition
of this truth lies, as I believe, the true secret of any satisfactory
method of treatment.
Does this fact justify inequality in general? Or does not the principle
of equality still remain as essentially implied in the Utopia which we
all desire to construct? We have to take it for granted that to each
man the first and primary moving instinct is and must be the love of
the little "platoon" of which he is a member; that the problem is, not
to destroy all these minor attractions, to obliterate the structure and
replace society by a vast multitude of independent atoms, each supposed
to aim directly at the good of the whole, but so to harmonise and
develop or restrain the smaller interests of families, of groups and
associations, that they may spontaneously co-operate towards the
general welfare. It is a long and difficult task to which we have to
apply ourselves; a task not to be effected by the demonstration or
application of a single abstract dogma, but to be worked out gradually
by the co-operation of many classes and of many generations. If it is
fairly solved in the course of a thousand years or so, I for one shall
be very fairly satisfied. But distant as the realisation may be, we may
or rather ought to consider seriously the end to which we should be
working. The conception implies a distinction of primary importance
towards any clear treatment of the problem. We have, that is, two
different, though not altogether distinct, provinces of what I may,
perhaps, call organic and functional morality. We may take the existing
order for granted, and ask what is then our duty; or we may ask how far
the structure itself requires modification, and, if so, what kind of
modification. A man who assumes the existence of the present structure
may act justly or unjustly within the limits so prescribed. He must
generally be guided in a number of cases by some principle of equality.
The judge should endeavour to give the same law to rich and poor; the
parent should not make arbitrary distinctions between his children; the
statesman should try to distribute his burdens without favouring one
particular class, and so forth. A man who, in such a sense, acts justly
may be described as up to the level of his age and its accepted
established moral ideas, and is, therefore, entitled at least to the
negative praise of not being corrupt or dishonest. He fulfils
accurately the functions imposed upon him, and is not governed by what
Bentham called the sinister interests which would prevent them from
being effectually discharged for the welfare of the community. But the
problem which we have to consider is the deeper and more difficult one
of organic justice; and our question is what justice means in this
case, or what are the irrelevant considerations to be excluded from our
motives of conduct.
Between these two classes of justice there are distinctions which it is
necessary to state briefly. Justice, as we generally use the word,
implies that the unjust man deserves to be hanged, or, at least, is
responsible for his actions. What "responsibility" precisely implies
is, of course, a debatable question. I only need assume that, in any
case, it implies that somebody is guilty of wrong-doing, for which he
should receive an appropriate penalty. But in organic questions it is
not the individual, but the race which is responsible; and we require a
reform, not a penalty. An impatient temper leads us to generalise too
hastily from the case of the individual to that of the country. We
bestow the blame for all the wrongs of an oppressed nation, for
example, upon the nation which oppresses. But in simple point of fact,
the oppressed nation generally deserves (if the word can be fairly
used) to share the blame. The trodden worm would not have been trodden
upon if it had been a bit of a viper. Whatever the duty of turning the
second cheek, it is clearly not a national duty. If we admire a Tell or
Robert Bruce for resisting oppressors, we implicitly condemn those who
submitted to oppressors. If a nation is divided or wanting in courage,
public spirit, and independence, it will be trampled down; and though
we may most rightfully blame the tramplers, it is idle to exonerate the
trampled. It is easy, in the same way, to make the rich solely
responsible for all the misery of the poor. The man who has got the
booty is naturally regarded as the robber. But, speaking
scientifically, that is, with the desire to state the plain facts, we
must admit that if the poor are those who have gone to the wall in the
struggle for wealth; then, whatever unjust weapons have been used in
that struggle, the improvidence and vice and idleness have certainly
been among the main causes of defeat. Here, as before, the question is
not, who is to be punished? We can only settle that when dealing with
individual cases. It is the question, what is the cause of certain
evils? and here we must resist the temptation of supposing that the
class which in some sense appears to profit by them, or, at least, to
be exempt from them, has, therefore, any more to do with bringing them
about than the class which suffers from them.
The reflection may put us in mind of what seems to be a general law.
The ultimate cause of the adoption of institutions and rules of conduct
is often the fact of their utility to the race; but it is only at a
later period that their utility becomes the conscious or avowed reason
for maintaining them. The political fabric has been clearly built up,
in great part, by purely selfish ambition. Nations have been formed by
energetic rulers, who had no eye for anything beyond the gratification
of their own ambition, although they were clear-headed enough to see
that their own ambition could best secure its objects by taking the
side of the stronger social forces, and by giving substantial benefit
to others. The same holds good pre-eminently of industrial relations.
We all know how Adam Smith, sharing the philosophical optimism of his
time, showed how the pursuit of his own welfare by each man tended, by
a kind of pre-ordained harmony, to contribute to the welfare of all.
Since his time we have ceased to be so optimistic, and have recognised
the fact that the building up of modern industrial systems has involved
much injury to large classes. And yet we may, I think, in great measure
adopt his view. The fact that each man was rogue enough to think first
of himself and of his own wife and family is not a proof or a
presumption that he did not flourish because, in point of fact, he was
contributing (quite unintentionally perhaps) to the comforts of mankind
in general. What we have to reflect is that, while the bare existence
of certain institutions gives a strong presumption of their utility,
there is also a probability that when the utility becomes a conscious
aim or a consciously adopted criterion of their advantage, they will
require a corresponding modification intended to secure the advantages
at a minimum cost of evil.