116 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
to white skin or to black skin. So far they are dealt with diorthoti- 
cally. But then the dianemetic, or distributive principle, comes 
into play ; — and suppose the estate to yield a shilling in the pound, 
one man gets five shillings, and the other gets fifty. The distribu- 
tion has reference to the objects of the suit, not to the suitors, and 
is wholly dianemetic. But so far is the dianemetic principle from 
acting alone, that it is in virtue of the diorthotic principle that it 
assigns fifty to a man who may possibly be a millionaire and a 
scoundrel, and five shillings 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, and the diorthotic principle dianemetically. Suppose 
that the suffrage is claimed by a particular class of persons whose 
right to it has hitherto been ignored or denied. What justice en- 
titles them to ask the State to do is, not to create new rights in their 
favour, but to recognise rights which they allege exist in their 
persons already. Here, too, they claim equality before the law — 
they demand a fair ( i.e ., a diorthotic) hearing. But their plea is 
that they are entitled to the suffrage on some ground , as they call 
it, — property, education, a hearth and a chimney, perhaps a fire, if 
they have it, or simple humanity. Whatever the ground may be, 
they demand that it should be diorthotically inquired into. But 
they do not dispute, except by mistake, that it must be dianemeti- 
cally recognised. Even if they ask the State to proceed on the 
assumption that they all possess the ground of recognition equally, 
they do not ask the State to make it equal to them all ; in other 
words, they do not ask it to give them means to teach them, or to 
make them human beings, for that would be to ask not recognition, 
not equality before the law, but revolution, or the abolition of the 
law. It was Bousseau’s doctrine that all men ought to be equal, 
and not Hobbes’s doctrine that all men are equal, and ought, con- 
sequently, to be recognised as such, which brought about the revolu- 
tions of last century, and which threaten us still. 
Keeping this distinction in view, then, it is obvious that, if 
justice is to be done between nations, there must, as in all other 
cases in which it is called into play, be proportion between the 
claimant and the thing granted to him (ois /cat ev ois), in order that 
those who are unequal may not have equal things (prj icrot ovk iaa 
