ABSOLUTE POLITICAL ETHICS. 611 



pushing and pulling, the blow of a fist, the recoil of a gun, and 

 the attraction of a planet. Still less has he any generalized idea 

 of reaction. And even had he these two ideas, it is probable that, 

 defective in power of representation as he is, he would fail to 

 recognize the necessary equality. Similarly with these a priori 

 ethical truths. If a speculative member of that Fijian slave-tribe 

 who regarded themselves as food for the chiefs had suggested that 

 there might come a place where men would not eat one another, 

 his implied belief that they might come to have a little respect for 

 one another's lives, condemned as utterly without justification in 

 experience, would be considered as fit only for a wild speculator. 

 Facts furnished by every-day observation make it clear to the 

 Biluchi, keeping watch in his mud tower, that possession of prop- 

 erty can be maintained only by force ; and it is most likely to him 

 scarcely conceivable that there exist limits which, if mutually rec- 

 ognized, may exclude aggressions, and make it needless to mount 

 guard over fields : only an absurd idealist (supposing such a thing 

 known to him) would suggest the possibility. And so even of our 

 own ancestors in feudal times, it may be concluded that, constantly 

 going about armed and often taking refuge in strongholds, the 

 thought of a peaceful social state would have seemed ridiculous ; 

 and the belief that there might be a recognized equality among 

 men's claims to pursue the objects of life, and a consequent desist- 

 ence from aggressions, would have been scarcely conceivable. But 

 now that an orderly social state has been maintained for genera- 

 tions now that in daily intercourse men rarely use violence, com- 

 monly pay what they owe, and in most cases respect the claims of 

 the weak as well as those of the strong now that they are brought 

 up with the idea that all men are equal before the law, and daily 

 see judicial decisions turning upon the question whether one citi- 

 zen has or has not infringed upon the equal rights of another ; 

 there exist in the general mind materials for forming the concep- 

 tion of a regime in which men's activities are mutually limited, 

 and in which maintenance of harmony depends on respect for the 

 limits. There has arisen an ability to see that mutual limitations 

 are necessitated when lives are carried on in proximity ; and to see 

 that there necessarily emerge definite sets of restraints applying 

 to definite classes of actions. And it has become manifest to some, 

 though not it seems to many, that there results an a priori system 

 of absolute political ethics a system under which men of like 

 natures, severally so constituted as spontaneously to refrain from 

 trespassing, may work together without friction, and with the 

 greatest advantage to each and all. 



" But men are not wholly like-natured and are unlikely to be- 

 come so. Nor are they so constituted that each is solicitous for 

 his neighbor's claims as for his own, and there is small probability 



