90 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



of a brilliant lawyer to obtain decisions entirely con- 

 trary to plain justice reminds us forcibly of the con- 

 ditions of the courts of Louis XII. Even when 

 the laws are legally applied we know too well that 

 justice is rarely done. The really guilty man goes 

 unpunished while the weak tool suffers for the deed. 

 But even if we should rise above these failures in the 

 application of justice, our laws are still, of necessity 

 perhaps, based upon the idea of the injury done 

 rather than the motive concerned. A man who lives 

 a life of petty meanness, causing the suffering and 

 ruin perhaps of hundreds, would receive, if rewarded 

 according to his motives, a much more severe pun- 

 ishment than one who in a fit of anger kills a fellow 

 man. But the law punishes the latter with extreme 

 severity, while the former likely goes through life 

 untouched by law. Justice is an ideal toward which 

 we hope our system of public law is tending and 

 which we think of as measured out in a final judg- 

 ment by an omniscient judge, but which is far from 

 realized by human law. But in the development of 

 public law there is a clear progress in this direction. 

 While courts are still largely a means of regulating 

 the payment for injuries done, either intentionally or 

 unintentionally, we are recognizing more and more 

 that their ultimate purpose is to measure out justice 

 rather than retaliation and payment. 



While morality, as we have defined it, was origi- 

 nally confined to the family relations and law to tribal 

 relations, this distinction soon began to break down 

 and moral codes began to extend beyond the family 

 bounds. Family customs, even though having their 

 origin partly in fear, were largely developed from 

 the feeling of love, and so long as love and sympathy 



