6i4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" Justice/' alike as formulated in law and administered by legal 

 instrumentalities, the title has a sufficiently large area to cover. 

 This would scarcely need saying were it not for a curious defect 

 of thought which we are everywhere led into by habit. 



Just as, when talking of knowledge, we ignore entirely that 

 familiar knowledge of surrounding things, animate and inani- 

 mate, acquired in childhood, in the absence of which death would 

 quickly result, and think only of that far less essential knowl- 

 edge gained at school and college or from books and conversation 

 just as, when thinking of mathematics, we include under the 

 name only its higher groups of truths and drop out that simpler 

 group constituting arithmetic, though for the carrying on of life 

 this is more important than all the rest put together ; so, when 

 politics and political ethics are discussed, there is no thought of 

 those parts of them which include whatever is fundamental and 

 long settled. The word political raises ideas of party-contests, 

 ministerial changes, prospective elections, or else of the Home- 

 Rule question, the Land-Purchase scheme, Local Option, or the 

 Eight-Hours movement. Rarely does the word suggest law-re- 

 form, or a better judicial organization, or a purified police. And 

 if ethics comes into consideration, it is in connection with the 

 morals of parliamentary strife or of candidates' professions, or of 

 electoral corruptions. Yet it needs but to look at the definition 

 of politics (" that part of ethics which consists in the regulation 

 and government of a nation or state, for the preservation of its 

 safety, peace, and prosperity "), to see that the current conception 

 fails by omitting the chief part. It needs but to consider how 

 relatively immense a factor in the life of each man is constituted 

 by safety of person, security of house and property, and enforce- 

 ment of claims, to see that not only the largest part but the part 

 which is vital is left out. Hence the absurdity does not exist in 

 the conception of an absolute political ethics, but it exists in the 

 ignoring of its subject-matter. Unless it be considered absurd to 

 regard as absolute the interdicts against murder, burglary, fraud, 

 and all other aggressions, it can not be considered absurd to re- 

 gard as absolute the ethical system which embodies these in- 

 terdicts. 



It remains to add that beyond the deductions which, as we 

 have seen, are verified by vast assemblages of inductions, there 

 may be drawn other deductions not thus verified deductions 

 drawn from the same data, but which have no relevant experi- 

 ences to say yes or no to them. Such deductions may be valid or 

 invalid ; and I believe that in my first work, written forty years 

 ago and long since withdrawn from circulation, there are some 

 invalid deductions. But to reject a principle and a method be- 

 cause of some invalid deductions is about as proper as it would 



