But such contrasts diminish, and at last disappear, as we turn our attention from conventional to essential duties. A Mussulman bigot, who would slay his son for drinking wine in honor of a supplementary god, would agree with the worshipers of that god that theft is a crime and benevolence a virtue. The innkeepers of Palermo obey their church and spite heretics by selling meat in June, but not in March; The innkeepers of El Medina spite unbelievers and honor the Koran by selling meat in March, but not in June. The Buddhist innkeepers of Lassa sell only salt meat, imported from China, and spite Infidels by refusing to kill a cow under any circumstances. But Sicilians, Thibetans, and Arabs would agree that no innkeeper should be permitted to spite a personal enemy by salting his meat with arsenic. Nations that totally disagree in their notions of propriety, in matters of taste, and in their bias of religious prejudice, will nevertheless be found to agree on the essential standards of humanity and justice. The “instinct of equity,” as Leibnitz calls the sense of natural justice, has been still better defined as the “instinct of keeping contracts.” A state of Nature is not always a state of equal rights. Skill, strength, and knowledge enjoy the advantage of superior power in the form of manifold privileges, but the expediency of “keeping contracts” naturally recommends itself as the only safe basis of social intercourse. Those contracts need not always be specified by written laws. They need not even be formulated in articulate speech. Their obligations are tacitly recognized as a preliminary of any sort of social coöperation, of any sort of social concomitance. “Give every man his due;” “Pay your debts;” “Give if you would receive,” are international maxims, founded on the earliest impressions of social instinct, rather than on the lessons of social science or of preternatural revelation. The first discoverers of the South Sea Islands were amazed by a license of sexual intercourse that seemed to exceed the grossest burlesques of French fiction; but they were almost equally surprised by the scrupulous exactness of commercial fair-dealing observed by those incontinent children of Nature. An islander, who had agreed to pay three bagfuls of yam-roots for a common pocket-knife, delivered two bagfuls (all his canoe would hold) before the evening of the next day, and received his knife, as the sailors had about all the provisions they could use. But the next morning, in trying to leave the coast by tacking against a fitful breeze, they were overtaken by a canoe, containing a desperately-rowing savage and that third bag of yam-roots. The traveler Chamisso mentions a tribe of Siberian fishermen who boarded his ship to deliver a harpoon which former visitors had forgotten in their winter-camp. Theft, according to the testimony even of their Roman adversaries, was almost unknown among the hunting-tribes of the primitive German woodlands. The natives of