[Footnote 4: It should be remembered, however, that in a society in which success really did depend upon the possession of the highest moral and bodily qualities that the community could display,--which is by no means the case at present,--poverty or failure would undoubtedly have a certain inexpungeable stigma upon it; and quite rightly too. That which removes the stigma from poverty or failure to-day, in the eyes of the enlightened, is the fact that riches and success are frequently achieved by people who could not possibly lay claim to any high moral and bodily qualities,--not to mention the highest.] [p44] CHAPTER II JUSTICE “Si nos coeurs battent, c’est dans ce but ... c’est pour que nous puissions compter sur l’avenir et savoir s’il y a dans les choses d’ici bas une justice immanente qui vient à son jour et à son heure[5].”--L. Gambetta (Cherbourg speech. August 9th, 1880). A discussion of the idea of justice almost necessarily precedes the subject of the next chapter, for the kind of justice which is the object of public clamour outside the law and police-courts, and beyond the dealings of man with man, provides one of the principal arguments to those who believe in human equality. In this essay, then, it is clear that we shall not be concerned either with the justice which includes the administration of the law, and the incidence of the law of any country, or with the justice which relates to the unwritten rules of conduct governing the commerce of men and women; but rather with that idea of equity which, while it enjoys a fast hold upon the imagination of all Western peoples, is supposed to have an existence apart from statutes, codes, regulations and by-laws, and human conventions. It is an abstraction, somewhat like the idea of equality; but it is not a mathematician’s abstraction, it is the abstraction of a moralist. It arises out of the idea of a moral order--that is to say, of a supposed universal tendency to arrive at a perfect equilibrium between deserts and rewards, and it assumes that the moment this perfect balance is disturbed, a violation of this abstract justice--Gambetta’s “_justice immanente_,”--is supposed to have occurred.