Truth to tell, the word justice--whether immanent or otherwise--is meaningless when applied to the universe. Nobody has ever dreamed of thinking out the billions and billions of post-mortem compensations which would be necessary to adjust the balance of only one year’s rapine and slaughter in the world of nature. Nobody has ever dreamt that such a calculation would even be possible. Injustice, if it have any meaning at all in this respect, is therefore written large all over the face of Life and Nature. Sentimentalists, like Wordsworth and Rousseau, by wilfully turning their backs upon [p53] the cruel sufferings of animals and insects in Nature, have been able to present a picture of Life to the world as attractive as it is false. But although pleasant lies of this sort are bound ultimately to do a good deal of damage, and have actually done a good deal of damage, they are also bound ultimately to be found out, and it is to be hoped that there is then an end to them, once and for all. It is not accurate, therefore, to read a moral order into the Universe. Life and Nature are essentially amoral. They are not concerned even with the A.B.C. of morality. All life outside human society, therefore, knows nothing of justice. On the contrary, “Life is appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation, and, at the very least, exploitation.” There is no such thing as a natural balance of virtue and reward, crime and punishment--even in the realm of social justice this balance is difficult enough to achieve. Misery is frequently encountered in Nature--in fact, universally so, divorced from sin. To perceive anything else in Nature is to contemplate her through rather smoky human spectacles--anthropomorphically. If, then, this notion of justice exists at all, it is only in the fancy of the morally prejudiced. Morality arises only in human society; therefore justice is exclusively a social phenomenon, a social expedient. It is not a universal law, but a concept of the social human being. It is not a principle transcending social life; it is the creation [p54] of social life, and means nothing outside it; it is man-made, man-maintained. In the light of this conclusion, what is meant, therefore, when Mrs. Jelleby-Jones, of Hampstead, who is a welfare worker, exclaims over her dinner to her husband that it seems so “unjust” that the poor little diseased babies she has been inspecting that afternoon should have been born with such a heavy handicap? Whose injustice, what injustice does she mean? Does she know what she means, and does she mean anything? We have seen that if her statement is to have any meaning at all, it must signify that mankind is unjust, that human society is unjust, and that, therefore, her particular form of human society is unjust; consequently that she and her husband, as forming part of that society, are unjust.