The alleged “injustices” of Life, can never be put right by man. They are beyond his power to remedy, however just his laws may be. All he can do is to mitigate the asperity of life for those of Nature’s less fortunately endowed offspring, who cannot aspire to the highest ridge; but even in doing this, he must be careful not to make it too easy for Nature’s failures to multiply over abundantly, otherwise the race most certainly deteriorates. The modern tendency, therefore, which consists in deliberately confounding the issue, by pointing to a number of Nature’s own “injustices” as if they were the outcome of man-made law, man-made conditions, [p60] and clamouring for them to be redressed, is wholly vicious. It deceives the multitude, maddens them into a false sense of their grievances, and frequently leads to disturbances which, though they prove sadly destructive of life and treasure, _must_ leave things more or less as they were, because the grievances chiefly complained of, are frequently rooted in Life itself. This does not mean that there are not man-made injustices in the creation and administration of law. Unfortunately they are too often as plentiful as those of Life itself. But by far the grossest so-called injustices are those of Nature and Life, which cannot by any means be removed, and least of all can they be even mitigated in a country whose population distinguishes so imperfectly between grievances which can be rightly brought home to man, and those that are inherent in the natural order of existence, that while they blindly clamour for the removal of the latter, the former, which might be corrected and are within man’s power to correct, are generally left studiously alone. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 5: “If our hearts beat, it is with this object ... it is in order that we may rely on the future and know whether there is an all-pervading justice in the things of this world, which ultimately has its day and comes to light at its appointed time.”] [Footnote 6: The present writer has even heard women declare that the lot of the female human being, with all its disabilities and physical burdens, constitutes an “unjust” apportionment of pain and pleasure when compared with the lot of the male. It is difficult to discover what injustice is meant here, unless we conclude that women who speak in this way have acquired from their stupid men-folk ideas about a certain justice behind phenomena or in Nature, which in their particular existence appears to be transgressed. In any case we are quite safe in assuming that it cannot be an infringement of man’s justice that is meant here. It must, therefore, be the imaginary justice which is the subject of this essay, and which moral people read into the universe.]