I have permitted this, that I might see the course of your argument in your own terms, but it is now needful that the confusion should cease. That wages _are_ determined by supply and demand is no proof that under any circumstances they must be--still less that under all circumstances they ought to be. Permit me, therefore, to know the sense in which you use the word "ought" in your paragraph lettered _b_, page 832[56] (second column), and to ask whether the words "due," "duty," "devoir," and other such, connected in idea with the first and third of the "præcepta juris" of Justinian, quoted by Blackstone as a summary of the whole doctrine of law (_honeste vivere,--alterum non lædere,--suumque cuique tribuere_), are without meaning to you except as conditions of agreement?[57] Whether, in fact, there be, in your view, any _honos_, absolutely; or whether we are to launch out into an historical investigation of the several kinds of happiness enjoyed in lives of rapine, of selfish trade, and of unselfish citizenship, and to decide only upon evidence whether we will live as pirates, as pedlers, or as gentlemen? If so, while I shall be glad to see you undertake, independently, so interesting an inquiry, I must reserve my comments on it until its close. But if you admit an absolute idea of a "devoir" of one man to another, and of every honorable man to himself, tell me why you dissent from my statement of the terms of that debt in the opening of this discussion. Observe, I asked for no evangelical virtue of returning good for evil: I asked only for the Sinaitic equity of return in good for good, as for Sinaitic equity of return in evil for evil. "Eye for eye," "tooth for tooth"--be it so; but will you thus pray according to the _lex talionis_ and not according to the _lex gratiæ_? Your debt is on both sides. Does a man take of your life, you take also of his. Shall he give you of his life, and will you not give him also of yours? If this be not your law of duty to him, tell me what other there is, or if you verily believe there is none.