The full development of the sentiment of justice has been the work of many centuries. At first, when the community is small and nomad, the idea that a stranger has a right to justice is incomprehensible. Even when with the growth of civilisation provision is made for according foreign merchants and others some protection from the law, the idea that the stranger has the same right to justice as the citizen is neither admitted by law nor entertained as a speculation. Indeed, the law, modest though it be, may be in advance of public opinion and of the practice of officials--witness the extortions practised by Roman governors on the Roman provinces. Eventually, however, public opinion outstrips the law and pronounces that even the colour of a man's skin cannot bar his claims to justice, and that the inhabitants of a country, though they be aborigines, have some rights in it. Finally comes philosophy and pronounces justice, absolute and stern, the one thing needful, the one and only duty which it is within the sphere and function of government to maintain. Unfortunately for the philosophy which maintains this view, it happens that, just when the authority of justice is admitted by the conscience of civilisation to be paramount, justice as an ideal is recognised to be neither capable of realisation nor absolutely desirable. It is obvious that in the best-regulated even of free communities the amount of justice which can be secured by the action of the law and the intervention of the State falls very far short of the ideal; and the multiplication of laws and State inquisitors, which would be necessary if every form of injustice and wrong-doing were to be punished by the State, would be a remedy, if indeed it were a remedy, worse than the disease. It is impossible to pretend to believe that wealth is distributed according to merit in any existing community, or that any governmental system, even if designed solely with that end in view, could ever determine what a man's merits were, or what his reward should be. Nor is the ill distribution of wealth the only factor of injustice, though it is the only factor with which the State could make pretence to deal: sickness and sorrow, grief and pain--nay, the very capacity for suffering and for joy--are dealt to different men in very different measure. It is plain matter of fact that earthly goods and pleasures are not distributed according to merit; and it is just when man's conquest of Nature has become most complete, when society is no longer struggling for a bare subsistence, when the demand for justice is most fully and unreservedly admitted, that the impossibility of meeting the demand and the danger of failing to meet it become most manifest. The poverty which accompanies progress may in one generation be less than it was in the previous generation, but the extremes of poverty and wealth grow daily wider apart, and the number of those who are poor increases in a growing