ON JUSTICE. 193 



nobody for more than one, 11 might be written under the principle of utility as an 

 explanatory commentary. 



Now though Bentham ridicules the taking of justice as our 

 guide, saying that while happiness is an end intelligible to all, 

 justice is a relatively unintelligible end, yet he tacitly asserts that 

 his principle — " everybody to count for one, nobody for more than 

 one/' is just ; since, otherwise, he would be obliged to admit that 

 it is unjust, and we may not suppose he would do so. Hence the 

 implication of his doctrine is that justice means an equal appor- 

 tionment of the benefits, material and immaterial, which men's 

 activities bring. There is no recognition of inequalities in men's 

 shares of happiness, consequent on inequalities of their faculties 

 or characters. 



This is the theory which Communism would reduce to prac- 

 tice. From one who knows him, I learn that Prince Krapotkin 

 blames the English socialists because they do -not propose to act 

 out the rule popularly worded as " share and share alike." In a 

 recent periodical, M. de Laveleye summed up the communistic 

 principle as being " that the individual works for the profit of the 

 State, to which he hands over the produce of his labor for equal 

 division among all." In the communistic Utopia described in Mr. 

 Bellamy's Looking Backward, it is held that each " shall make 

 the same effort," and that if by the same efforts, bodily or mental, 

 one produces twice as much as another, he is not to be advantaged 

 by the difference. At the same time the intellectually or physic- 

 ally feeble are to be quite as well off as others : the assertion 

 being that the existing regime is one of " robbing the incapable 

 class of their plain right in leaving them unprovided for." 



The principle of inequality is thus denied absolutely. It is 

 assumed to be unjust that superiority of nature shall bring supe- 

 riority of results, or, at any rate, superiority of material results ; 

 and as no distinction appears to be made in respect either of phys- 

 ical qualities or intellectual qualities or moral qualities, the im- 

 plication is not only that strong and weak shall fare alike, but that 

 foolish and wise, worthy and unworthy, mean and noble, shall do 

 the same. For if, according to this conception of justice, defects of 

 nature, physical or intellectual, ought not to count, neither ought 

 moral defects, since they are one and all primarily inherited. 



And here, too, we have a deliberate abolition of that cardinal 

 distinction between the ethics of the family and the ethics of the 

 State emphasized at the outset : an abolition which must eventu- 

 ate in decay and disappearance of the species or variety in which 

 it takes place. 



After contemplation of these divergent conceptions of justice, 

 in which the ideas of inequality and equality almost or quite ex- 



VOL. XXXVII. — 15 



