e activity and seriously impair the immediate usefulness of
Mr. Forster and his coadjutors in the Endowed School Commission, I am
exceedingly sorry, but not in the least shaken in my conviction that the
principle ought to be rigidly adhered to. If parochial or other
communities are too stupid or too selfish to consent that school
endowments under their charge shall be applied to purposes of more
extensive utility than the founders contemplated, every effort should be
made to persuade or to shame them into consenting, but without their
consent the thing should on no account be done. On this point
Utilitarianism and Anti-utilitarianism would, I apprehend, give
identical counsel, the former condemning as impolitic what the latter
denounced as unjust. The cause of national education would be ill served
by any course calculated to discourage its future endowment by private
testators, and nothing would be more likely to have that effect than
arbitrary interference with the endowments of former testators.

The courteous reader may now be temporarily released, with fitting
acknowledgment of his exemplary patience. It would be cruel to detain
him with a recapitulation, without which he may readily trace for
himself, in what has gone before, the outlines of a consistent body of
anti-utilitarian ethics. In these there is little new, little that has
not been anticipated by many an old-fashioned saw and antiquated
apothegm--such as, _Fiat justitia ruat caelum_, 'Be just before you are
generous,' and, I would fain add, 'Honesty is the best policy'--save
that to that Utilitarianism may fairly lay equal claim. My modest
ambition throughout this essay has been to vindicate some of the most
momentous of primeval truths from the slights to which philosophy--not
modern, indeed, but modernised and refurbished--is continually
subjecting them, and I will not deny that I have modest assurance enough
to believe that I have at least partially succeeded. I think I have
shown that there are such things as abstract right and wrong, resting
not on fancied intuition, but on a solidly rational basis, and
supporting in turn abstract justice, whose guidance, whoever accepts it,
will find to be as sure and as adequate as any that unassisted reason is
capable of supplying. Anti-utilitarian justice never tries to look
half-a-dozen different ways at once, never points at the same time in
opposite directions, never issues contradictory mandates, never halts