[55] "Yes. But, generally speaking, rules are beneficial; hence, generally speaking, justice is a good thing in fact. A state of society might be imagined in which it would be a hideously bad thing."--(Foot-note answer of the _Gazette_.) [From "The Pall Mall Gazette," May 22, 1865.] _WORK AND WAGES._ _To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."_ SIR: I have long delayed my reply to your notes on my last letter; partly being otherwise busy--partly in a pause of surprise and doubt how low in the elements of ethics we were to descend. Let me, however, first assure you that I heartily concur in your opening remarks, and shall be glad to spare useless and avoid discourteous words. When you said, in your first reply to me, that my letter embodied fallacies which appeared to you pernicious in the highest degree, _I_ also "could not consider this sort of language well judged." When you called one of your own questions an answer, and declared it to be "simple and perfectly conclusive," I thought the flourish might have been spared; and for having accused you of writing carelessly, I must hope your pardon; for the discourtesy, in my mind, would have been in imagining you to be writing with care. For instance, I should hold it discourteous to suppose you unaware of the ordinary distinction between law and equity: yet no consciousness of such a distinction appears in your articles. I should hold it discourteous to doubt your acquaintance with the elementary principles laid down by the great jurists of all nations respecting Divine and Human law; yet such a doubt forces itself on me if I consider your replies as deliberate. And I should decline to continue the discussion with an opponent who could conceive of justice as (under any circumstances) "an hideously bad thing," if I did not suppose him to have mistaken the hideousness of justice, in certain phases, to certain persons, for its ultimate nature and power. There may be question respecting these inaccuracies of thought; there can be none respecting the carelessness of expression which causes the phrases "are" and "ought to be" to alternate in your articles as if they were alike in meaning.