, perhaps, that men should be rewarded
according to their services to society, however difficult it may be to
arrange the proportions. But it soon appears that the various classes
into which society is actually divided imply differences not due to the
individual and his intrinsic merits, but to the varying surroundings in
which he is placed. To do justice, then, it becomes necessary to get
rid of these differences. The extreme case is that of the family. Every
one probably owes more to his mother and to his early domestic
environment than to any other of the circumstances which have
influenced his development. If you and I started as perfectly equal
babies, and you have become a saint and I a sinner, the divergence
probably began when our mothers watched our cradles, and was made
inevitable before we had left their knees. Consequently, the more
thorough-going designers of Utopia have proposed to abolish this
awkward difference. Men must be different at their birth; but we might
conceivably arrange public nurseries which should place them all under
approximately equal conditions. Then any differences would result from
a man's intrinsic qualities, and he might be said to be rewarded simply
according to his own merits.

The plan may be tempting, but has its disadvantages. There are
injustices, if we call all inequality injustice, which we can only
attribute to nature or to the unknown power which makes men and
monkeys, Shakespeares and Stephens. And one result is that the
character and conduct of human beings depend to a great extent upon
circumstances, which are accidental in the sense that they are
circumstances other than the original endowment of the individual. In
this sense, maternal love, for example, is unjust. The mother loves her
child because it is her own, not because it is better (though of course
it is better) than other children. So, as Adam Smith, I think,
observed, we are more moved by our neighbour's suffering from a corn on
his great toe than by the starvation of millions in China. In other
words, the affections, which are the great moving forces of society,
are unjust in so far as they cause us to be infinitely more interested
in our own little circle than in the remoter members of humanity known
to us only by report. Without discussing the "justice" of this
arrangement, we shall have, I think, to admit that it is inevitable.
For I, at least, hold that the vague and vast organism of humanity
depends fo