To take an instance which illustrates this notion of justice, it is popularly supposed that for a child, who can have committed no crime sufficiently great to deserve severe punishment, to be born in a sordid home, in a still more sordid city-quarter, of drunken parents, some disturbance of the balance of justice must have occurred--a disturbance which, if it is to be corrected, must require some kind of compensation. If the compensation cannot be conceived as forthcoming in this life, another life is postulated, in which the proper equilibrium between deserts and rewards;[sic] will be restored. It is not enough to say that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. Although the ancient Jewish view of universal justice doubtless required some such explanation, and found it satisfactory, the modern view of “immanent justice” is not satisfied by this method of settling the question. Indeed, the very idea that children should expiate their parents’ sins is abhorrent to the modern mind, steeped as it is in this notion of justice. It only consents to it as a fact in the face of overwhelming [p46] physiological and biological evidence, and, even then, takes refuge from the apparent harshness of the law, in the settled conviction that somewhere, somewhen, compensation will be provided for the expiatory suffering. It is the suffering that can be traced to no particular _transgression_ on the part of the individual, that chiefly outrages the modern man; that is why it seems fair to conclude that this notion of immanent justice has a moral foundation.[6] As a matter of fact, there is nothing more unjust than this notion of justice, but its injustice is by no means obvious. There is no outcry when a murderer is hanged, although psychology, heredity and even sociology, may be called to witness that his act was as inevitable as is the crippledom of the child born of tainted blood. There is no outcry when a vicious reprobate dies in poverty and pain. There is no outcry when an habitual criminal ends his days on the treadmill. Morality here receives its tribute. Chemistry, physiology, biology, and the laws of heredity that derive from them are superseded by the moral bias, and there appears to be no violation of that “immanent” justice when one of Nature’s born ne’er-do-wells comes to a sad end in a prison quadrangle. In cases of suffering which are less easily traced to an apparently deliberate transgression of moral laws, however, a miscarriage of universal justice is supposed to have occurred, and the sympathy of all, and even the indignation of some, are immediately aroused.