JUSTICE.
A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT.
Moral philosophers have long conjectured the distinction between
natural and conventional duties; and only the full recognition of that
distinction can reconcile the conflicting views on the natural basis of
ethics. On the other hand, the defenders of the theory of “Intuitive
Morality” claim the existence of an innate moral conscience, common to
all nations and all stages of social development, while, on the other
hand, we hear it as confidently asserted that the standards of virtue
are mere standards of expedience, and vary with circumstances as
fashions vary with seasons and climates. There is no doubt, for
instance, that religious bigotry has begot a sort of factitious
conscience, shrinking from the mere idea of devoting the seventh day of
the week to physical recreations, while the devotees of the joy-loving
gods of paganism thought it a solemn duty to celebrate their holidays
with festive revels. Marriage between persons of adventitious
relationship (such as widows and their surviving brothers-in-law) is
prohibited by the statutes of one creed, and not only sanctioned, but
distinctly enjoined, by those of another. Speculative dogmas that would
deeply shock the followers of Abd el Wahab are tolerated in
Constantinople and venerated in Rome.
But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our
attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who
would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god,
would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and
benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and
spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The
innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by
selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of
Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by
refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians,
Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted
to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations
that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of
taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be
found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The
“instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice,
has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A
state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength,
and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of
manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts”
naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social
intercourse. Those contracts need not always be specified by written
laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their
obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of
social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man
his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are
international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social
instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of
preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea
Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to
exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost
equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial
fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An
islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common
pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before
the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had
about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in
trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were
overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that
third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of
Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which
former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to
the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among
the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of
San Salvador received their Spanish invaders with respectful
hospitality, and scrupulously abstained from purloining, or even
touching, any article of their ship-stores; and a similar reception
welcomed their arrival in Cuba and San Domingo, the natives being
apparently unable to conceive the idea that their guests could repay
good with evil. “Fair play” is the motto of boyish sports in the kraals
of Kaffir-land, not less than on the recess-ground of Eton College. A
rudimentary sense of justice manifests itself even among social
animals. A baboon who wantonly attacks an inoffensive fellow-ape is
liable to get mobbed by the whole troop. A nest-robbing hawk has to
beat an immediate retreat under penalty of being attacked by all the
winged neighbors and relatives of his victims. Dogs that will endure
the most inhuman methods of training are not apt to forgive an act of
gratuitous cruelty. They may resign themselves to a system of
consistent severity, but refuse to submit to evident injustice.
B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
Justice is the royal attribute of noble souls; the most inalienable
crown of their prestige. Men who would defy the power of superior
strength, or envy and depreciate the superior gifts of genius, will do
unbidden homage to the majesty of superior justice. “Mars is a tyrant,”
says Plutarch, in the epilogue of “Demetrius,” “but justice is the
rightful sovereign of the world.” “The things which kings receive from
heaven are not machines for taking towns, or ships with brazen beaks,
but law and justice; these they are to guard and cultivate. And it is
not the most warlike, the most violent and sanguinary, but the justest
of princes, whom Homer calls the disciple of Jupiter.” History has more
than once confirmed that test of supremacy. The reputation of
incorruptible integrity alone has made poor princes, and even private
citizens, the arbiters of nations.
King Hieron of Syracuse thus arbitrated the disputes of his warlike
neighbors. Plato, Phocion, Philopoemen, Cato, and Abencerrage (Ibn
Zerrag) settled international quarrels which the sword had failed to
decide. The prestige of uprightness has made honor almost a synonyme of
an “honorable,” i.e., honest, reputation. The commercial integrity of
Hebrew merchants has overcome race-jealousies and religious prejudices,
and in America the worship of wealth does not prevent an upright judge
from ranking high above a wealthier, but less scrupulous, attorney.
The consciousness of a just cause is an advantage which, more than
once, has outweighed a grievous disadvantage in wealth and power. It
biased the fortune of war in the battles of Leuctra and Lodi; it
enabled the Scythian herdsmen to annihilate the veterans of King Cyrus,
and the Swiss peasants to rout the chivalry of Austria and Burgundy. A
just cause enlists sympathy, and, as a bond of union, surpasses the
value of common interests, which a slight change of circumstances is
apt to turn into conflicting interests and disagreement. Strict
adherence to the principles of political equity has preserved small
states in the midst of powerful neighbors, whose greed of conquest is
restrained by their hesitation to incur the odium of wanton aggression.
Belgium, Holland, and Denmark have thus preserved their national
independence in Europe, as Japan and Acheen in the East. In Central
Africa the honesty and simplicity of the agricultural Ethiopians has
proved a match for the cunning of the predatory Moors, who constantly
pillage their neighbors, but as constantly quarrel about the division
of their spoils, and, in the vicissitudes of their civil wars, have
again and again been obliged to purchase the alliance of the despised
“heathen.”
The practical advantages of integrity have been recognized in the
proverbial wisdom of all nations, but are not confined to the affairs
of commercial intercourse. In the long run, honesty is the “best
policy,” even in avocations where the perversion of justice may seem to
promise a temporary advantage. A lawyer who refuses to defend a wealthy
knave against a poor plaintiff will gain in self-respect, and
ultimately also in professional reputation, more than he has lost in
direct emoluments. A politician who refuses to resort to chicanes may
miss the chance of a short-lived triumph, but will sow a seed of
prestige sure to ripen its eventual harvest.
C.—PERVERSION.
Justice, in the pristine pagan sense of the word, was too natural and
too manly a virtue to find much favor with the whining moralists of
Antinaturalism. The truth which a modern philosopher has condensed in
the sarcasm that “an honest god is the noblest work of man,” was
recognized already by the ancient historian who observed that “every
nation makes its gods the embodiments of its own ideals,” though,
happily, it is not always true that “no worshiper is better than the
object of his worship.” To some degree, however, the moral standards of
the Mediterranean pagans were undoubtedly prejudiced by the lewd
propensities of their Olympians, and it is equally certain that the
extravagant injustice of Christian fanatics can be partly explained, as
well as condoned, by the moral characteristics of their dogma-God.
According to the accepted doctrine of the Middle Ages, the
administrative principles of that God seemed to imply a degree of moral
perversity which even the poetic license of a saner age would have
hesitated to ascribe to a fiend. The same deity whom the creed of the
Galilean church makes the omniscient creator of all the physical and
moral instincts of human nature, nevertheless was supposed to punish
with endless torture nearly every free gratification of those
instincts, and demand a voluntary renunciation of a world which his own
bounty had filled with every blessing, and adorned with every charm of
loveliness. The God who endowed us with faculties of reason, of which a
moderate share is sufficient to perceive the absurdities of the
Christian dogma, nevertheless avenges the repudiation of that dogma as
an “unpardonable sin against the authority of his sacred word.” The
most natural action, the eating of an apple, is made the pretext of the
supposed fall of man, and of penalties affecting not only his progeny,
but all his fellow-creatures, and even the lower products of organic
Nature; while the greatest of all imaginable crimes, a Deicide, the
cruel murder of a god, is accepted as a basis of redemption. The
doctrine of salvation by grace made the distribution of punishments and
rewards a matter of mere caprice. The dogmatists of predestination
distinctly taught that the “elect” were not saved by their own merits,
but by an inscrutable, incalculable, and gratuitous act of divine
favor, while others were as inevitably foredoomed to an eternity of
woe. By faith alone, or by faith and the ceremony of immersion, the
guilt of a sinful life could, withal, be cancelled in the eleventh
hour, while the omission of that ceremony doomed even children, nay,
newborn babes, to the abyss of hellfire. “There is no doubt,” the
Solomon of the Patristic Age assures us, “that infants, only a few
spans in length, are crawling on the bottom of hell,” a doctrine which
the historian of Rationalism justly stigmatizes as “so atrocious, and
at the same time so extravagantly absurd, that it would be simply
impossible for the imagination to surpass its insanity.” Yet for more
than twelve hundred years Christians were in danger of being burnt at
the stake for refusing to attribute such infamies to their creator.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
Need we wonder that the converts of that creed believed in the merit of
passive submission to the caprices of earthly despots, and scorned the
appeals of justice in their dealings with pagans and Freethinkers? Why
should men try to be better than their God? The worshiper of a God who
doomed the souls of unbaptized children and honest dissenters,
naturally had no hesitation in assailing the bodies of their
unbelieving fellow-men, and princes who loaded fawning sycophants with
favors which they denied to honest patriots could appeal to the
sanction of a divine precedent. Every petty “sovereign of six faithful
square miles” accordingly became a law to himself. A man’s might was
the only measure of his right; the Faust-Recht, the “first law” of
iron-clad bullies, reigned supreme from the Baltic to the
Mediterranean, and the judges of (the only independent) ecclesiastic
courts confined their attention to ferocious punishments of neglect in
the payment of tithes, and the performance of socage duties and
ceremonies. The belief in the divine right of potentates, and passive
submission to even the most outrageous abuse of that power, were
assiduously inculcated as primary duties of a Christian citizen.
Natural justice, civil rights, and the laws of humanity had no place in
that code of revealed ethics.
Such teachings bore their fruit in the horrors of insurrection. In the
Peasants’ War thousands of convents and castles were rent as by the
outburst of a hurricane, and their dwellers had to learn the
inconvenience of having to submit to the powers that happened to be, by
being torn limb from limb, or flayed and roasted alive.
“Si no se obedecen los leyes, es ley que todo se pierde,” is the
Spanish translation of an old Arabian proverb: “If justice is
disregarded, it is just that everything perish”—a doom which the
intolerable outrages against human rights and humanity at last
experienced in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. There, too, the
despisers of natural justice had to eat their own doctrine, the
strongholds of absolutism that had withstood the tears of so many
generations were swept away by a torrent of blood, and the priests and
princes whose inhumanity had turned their serfs into wild beasts
learned the significance of their mistake when their own throats were
mangled by the fangs of those beasts.
The doctrine of salvation by grace had substituted favor and caprice
for the rights of natural justice, and for a series of centuries the
consequences of its teachings were seen in the treatment of nearly
every benefactor of mankind. The prince who devoted the fruits of his
conquests to the feeding of countless convent drones, let scholars
starve and loaded the discoverer of a New World with chains. His
successors who lavished the treasures of their vast empire on pimps and
clerical mountebanks, let Cervantes perish in penury. The sovereign
protector of a thousand stall-fed prelates refused to relieve the last
distress of John Kepler. The moralists who thought it a grievance that
the church should be denied the right of tithing the lands of southern
Spain, had no pity for the sufferings of the men whose labor had made
those lands blossom like the gardens of paradise, and who were exiled
by thousands for the crime of preferring the unitary God of the Koran
to the trinitary gods of the New Testament.
E.—REFORM.
The perversion of our moral standards by the dogmas of an antinatural
creed is still glaringly evident in the prevailing notions of natural
justice and the precedence of social duties. The modern Crœsus who
deems it incumbent on his duties as a citizen and a Christian to
contribute an ample subvention to the support of an orthodox seminary,
has no hesitation in swelling his already bloated income by reducing
the wages of a hundred starving factory children and taking every
sordid advantage in coining gain from the loss of helpless tenants and
dependants. The pious Sabbatarians who doom their poor neighbors to an
earthly Gehenna and premature death by depriving them of every chance
for healthful recreation, lavish their luxuries and their endearments
on the caged cutthroat who edifies his jailer by renouncing the
vanities of this worldly sphere and ranting about the bliss of the New
Jerusalem. The bank cashier who would never be pardoned for kicking the
hind-parts of a mendicant missionary is readily absolved from the sin
of such secular indiscretions as embezzling the savings of a few
hundred widows and orphans.
Before resuming the rant about our solicitude for the interests of
departed souls, we should learn to practice a little more common
honesty in our dealings with the interests of our living fellow-men.
Natural justice would be less frequently outraged if our moral
reformers would distinctly repudiate the doctrines of vicarious
atonement and salvation by faith, and hold every man responsible for
his own actions, irrespective of his belief or disbelief in the claims
of an Asiatic miracle-monger. And moreover, the exponents of Secularism
should insist on a truth not unknown to the moralists of antiquity,
that habitual submission to injustice is a vice instead of a virtue,
and that he who thinks it a merit to signalize his unworldliness by
failing to assert his own rights encourages oppression and fraud and
endangers the rights of his honest fellow-men.