"Justice is the central star which governs societies, the pole about which the political world revolves, the principle and rule of all transactions. Nothing is done among men that is not in the name of _right_; nothing without invoking justice. Justice is not the work of the law; on the contrary, the law is never anything but a declaration and application of what is _just_."[132] "Suppose a society where justice is outranked, however little, by another principle, say religion; or in which certain individuals are regarded more highly, by however little, than others; I say that, justice being virtually annulled, it is inevitable that the society will perish sooner or later.[133] "It is the privilege of justice that the faith which it inspires is unshakable, and that it cannot be dogmatically denied or rejected. All peoples invoke it; reasons of State, even while they violate it, profess to be based on it; religion exists only for it; skepticism dissembles before it; irony has power only in its name; crime and hypocrisy do it homage. [If liberty is not an empty phrase, it acts only in the service of right; even when it rebels against right, at bottom it does not curse it.]"[134] "All the most rational teachings of human wisdom about justice are summed up in this famous adage: _Do to others what you would have done to you; Do not to others what you would not have done to you._"[135] 3.--LAW I. _In the name of justice Proudhon rejects, not law indeed, but almost all individual legal norms, and the State laws in particular._ The State makes laws, and "as many laws as the interests which it meets with; and, since interests are innumerable, the legislation-machine must work uninterruptedly. Laws and ordinances fall like hail on the poor populace. After a while the political soil will be covered with a layer of paper, and all the geologists will have to do will be to list it, under the name of _papyraceous formation_, among the epochs of the earth's history. The Convention, in three years one month and four days, issued eleven thousand six hundred laws and decrees; the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies had produced hardly less; the empire and the later governments have wrought as industriously. At present the '_Bulletin des Lois_' contains, they say, more than fifty thousand; if our representatives did their duty this enormous figure would soon be doubled. Do you believe that the populace, or the government itself, can keep its sanity in this labyrinth?"[136]