Notions about justice, in the heads of dull or selfish or angry men, have done so much harm that I sometimes despairingly inquire whether it would not be better if the very principle itself had never been discovered. Dull men follow paths which they have been told are just until they ruin them with ruts. Selfish men are just only to themselves with a complacency denied to those who have no doctrine to sustain them. Angry men vindicate their rages and unreason by pointing to the primitive sense—father of revenge and vendetta—from which we with so much difficulty free ourselves in the long progress toward civil conditions. If justice, according to an enthusiastic hyperbole of Emerson’s, is the rhyme of things, then the vulgar conceptions of it are no more than tinkling couplets. A blow struck must rhyme instanter with a blow received; an eye rhymes with an eye, a tooth with a tooth, burning with burning, and strife with strife. Or, to allude to another mode of literature, justice in its primitive aspects is merely melodrama, wherein virtue is always rewarded with prosperity and evil is always fatally punished. The mood which followed the war was the mood of melodrama, on a larger scale, perhaps, than ever before in human history. Germany, seen solely as a bully and a brute, had been beaten at her own foul game; therefore let her be joyously annihilated, while the gallery gods who filled the theatre of the world almost from top to bottom hooted and gloried at the justice weighed out to her. What made it harder to contend against the uproar was that the uproar at first thought seemed justifiable. Nemesis never looks like so righteous a doctor as when he feeds a poisoner his own poison. But I always suspect first thoughts. For civilization, after all, is but the substitution for first thoughts of second or third or hundredth thoughts, reason supplanting passion, and polity guiding anarchic instinct. Melodrama is what commonly occurs to us first, in the form of those too neat or too hasty moral conclusions to which we are all more or less prone to jump when we allow ourselves to indulge too amply the sense of primitive justice which we share with all the savages of our ancestry.