RELATIVE EQUALITY TO INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION. 567 



conduct of the suit, or of the investigation, "whatever form it may take, and 

 whether it be conducted for judicial or legislative purposes ; the second, relative 

 equality, governs the decision of the cause, whether that decision be pronounced 

 in a Small Debt Court or in a Congress of Nations. 



As an illustration of the mutual action of these principles in private law, take 

 the familiar case of the distribution of a bankrupt-estate. One man has invested 

 L.5, and another has invested L.50, in the concern. As suitors, the law puts 

 them on a footing of absolute equality. No preference is given to Jew or to 

 Gentile, to noble or to simple, to white skin or to black skin. So far they are 

 dealt with diorthotically. But then the dianemetic or distributive principle 

 comes into play ; and, supposing the estate to yield Is. per L., the one man would 

 get 5s., and the other would get 50s. The distribution has reference to the objects 

 of the suit, not to the suitors, and is wholly dianemetic. But so far is the diane- 

 metic principle from acting alone, that it is in virtue of the diorthotic principle 

 that it assigns 50s. to a man who may possibly be a millionaire and a scoundrel, 

 and 5s. to a man who may be a pauper and a saint. 



And just in the same way, the presence of both principles is indispensable to 

 the decision of questions of a public nature. There, too, justice demands that 

 the dianemetic principle shall act diorthotically. The action of the diorthotic 

 principle in public is less obvious than in private law, because the State, in a 

 proximate sense, is the source of the rights which it recognises ; and in this sense 

 its whole function seems to consist in distributing, and not in recognising rights. 

 Still, even the State distributes, or ought to distribute, on a principle — on what, 

 in the absolute sense at least, must be regarded as a foregone conclusion ; and the 

 recognition and fair application of this principle rests on, and implies the action, 

 not of dianemetic or distributive, but of diorthotic or corrective justice. Suppose 

 that the suffrage is claimed by a particular class of persons whose right to it has 

 hitherto been ignored or denied. What they ask the State to do is, not to make new 

 rights in their favour, but to recognise rights which they allege exist in their per- 

 sons already. Their plea is that they are entitled to the suffrage on some exist- 

 ing ground, as they call it — property, education, a hearth and a chimney, or 

 simple humanity. Whatever the ground may be, they demand that it shall be 

 diorthotically recognised ; but there the diorthotic principle stops. They don't 

 ask the State to give them means on which they may ground their rights 

 — for this would be to ask, not for recognition, but for revolution; and the same 

 would be the case were they to ask the State to make them equal in all, or in 

 any of these respects. The utmost limits to which the doctrines of the positive 

 school of jurisprudence can be carried, with safety to the rights of private pro- 

 perty, are the recognition of the right of every man to the conditions of self-help. 

 Life is God's gift, and life involves freedom, and freedom involves the external 

 conditions on which its exercise depends, — support to the impotent, instruction 



