370 Justice and the Expansion of Life 



has replaced the image with the word, it has re- 

 placed calculation of interest by the love of good 

 and hatred of evil. Self-interest is no longer 

 consciously present, but the good is synonymous 

 with enlightened self-interest, as we have seen in 

 Chapter XL Now conscience has become one of 

 the great factors in human happiness. When a 

 man commits an act which he knows is evil, he 

 feels himself degraded and disgraced: he is un- 

 happy. So too with nations. The oppression of 

 subject peoples causes something like a series of 

 permanent cerebral lesions in the oppressors. The 

 Russians oppressing Poles and Finns ; the Germans 

 oppressing Poles, Danes, and Alsatians; the Mag- 

 yars, Serbians and Roumanians; the EngHsh, the 

 East Indians; and the Americans, the FiHpinos, 

 ought to feel themselves disgraced and degraded. 

 Unfortunately the masses do not feel so; that is 

 because the general public has not yet a sufficiently 

 keen insight into far-reaching social phenomena. 

 But in every civilized country there is a growing 

 group who feel such shame. The day will come 

 when collective crimes will appear to the masses as 

 odious as individual crimes do today. It will then 

 be realized that happiness without justice is for 

 nations as for men the most chimerical of dreams. 

 Happiness and justice are then synonymous. 

 All the goods of the world without sympathy profit 

 a man nothing. Hatred contracts the soul as cold 

 contracts a metal. Could the nations of the world 

 but realize this! It is only injustice that keeps 



