On the contrary, it is certain that necessity rules in all the

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affairs of men, and that the interest and even the life of one man must often be sacrificed to the interest and welfare of his country. Some must ever lead the forlorn hope: the missionary must go among savages, bearing his life in his hand; the physician must expose himself to pestilence for the sake of others; the sailor, in the frail boat upon the wide ocean, escaped from the foundering or burning ship, must step calmly into the hungry waters, if the lives of the passengers can be saved only by the sacrifice of his own; the pilot must stand firm at the wheel, and let the flames scorch away his own life to insure the common safety of those whom the doomed vessel bears.

The mass of men are always looking for what is just. All the vast machinery which makes up a State, a world of States, is, on the part of the people, an attempt to organize, not that ideal justice which finds fault with God’s ordinances, but that practical justice which may be attained in the actual organization of the world. The minute and wide-extending civil machinery which makes up the law and the courts, with all their officers and implements, on the part of mankind, is chiefly an effort to reduce to practice the theory of right. Constitutions are made to establish justice; the decisions of courts are reported to help us judge more wisely in time to come. The nation aims to get together the most nearly just men in the State, that they may incorporate into statutes their aggregate sense of what is right. The people wish law to be embodied justice, administered without passion. Even in the wildest ages there has been a wild popular justice, but always mixed with passion and administered in hate; for justice takes a rude form with rude men, and becomes less mixed with hate and passion in more civilized communities. Every progressive State revises its statutes and revolutionizes its constitution from time to time, seeking to come closer to the utmost possible practical justice and right; and sometimes, following theorists and dreamers in their adoration for the ideal, by erecting into law positive principles of theoretical right, works practical injustice, and then has to retrace its steps.

In literature men always look for practical justice, and desire that virtue should have its own reward, and vice its appropriate punishment. They are ever on the side of justice and humanity; and the majority of them have an ideal justice, better than the things about them, juster than the law: for the law is ever imperfect,

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not attaining even to the utmost practicable degree of perfection; and no man is as just as his own idea of possible and practicable justice. His passions and his necessities ever cause him to sink below his own ideal. The ideal justice which men ever look up to and strive to rise toward, is true; but it will not be realized in this world. Yet we must approach as near to it as practicable, as we should do toward that ideal democracy that “now floats before the eyes of earnest and religious men,–fairer than the Republic of Plato, or More’s Utopia, or the Golden Age of fabled memory,” only taking care that we do not, in striving to reach and ascend to the impossible ideal, neglect to seize upon and hold fast to the possible actual. To aim at the best, but be content with the best possible, is the only true wisdom. To insist on the absolute right, and throw out of the calculation the important and all-controlling element of necessity, is the folly of a mere dreamer.

In a world inhabited by men with bodies, and necessarily with bodily wants and animal passions, the time will never come when there will be no want, no oppression, nor servitude, no fear of man, no fear of God, but only Love. That can never be while there are inferior intellect, indulgence in low vice, improvidence, indolence, awful visitations of pestilence and war and famine, earthquake and volcano, that must of necessity cause men to want, and serve, and suffer, and fear.

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