sider the idea of justice and its obligations
as applicable to many things which neither are, nor is it desired that
they should be, regulated by law. Nobody desires that laws should
interfere with the whole detail of private life; yet every one allows
that in all daily conduct a person may and does show himself to be
either just or unjust. But even here, the idea of the breach of what
ought to be law, still lingers in a modified shape. It would always give
us pleasure, and chime in with our feelings of fitness, that acts which
we deem unjust should be punished, though we do not always think it
expedient that this should be done by the tribunals. We forego that
gratification on account of incidental inconveniences. We should be glad
to see just conduct enforced and injustice repressed, even in the
minutest details, if we were not, with reason, afraid of trusting the
magistrate with so unlimited an amount of power over individuals. When
we think that a person is bound in justice to do a thing, it is an
ordinary form of language to say, that he ought to be compelled to do
it. We should be gratified to see the obligation enforced by anybody who
had the power. If we see that its enforcement by law would be
inexpedient, we lament the impossibility, we consider the impunity given
to injustice as an evil, and strive to make amends for it by bringing a
strong expression of our own and the public disapprobation to bear upon
the offender. Thus the idea of legal constraint is still the generating
idea of the notion of justice, though undergoing several transformations
before that notion, as it exists in an advanced state of society,
becomes complete.

The above is, I think, a true account, as far as it goes, of the origin
and progressive growth of the idea of justice. But we must observe, that
it contains, as yet, nothing to distinguish that obligation from moral
obligation in general. For the truth is, that the idea of penal
sanction, which is the essence of law, enters not only into the
conception of injustice, but into that of any kind of wrong. We do not
call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be
punished in some way or other for doing it; if not by law, by the
opinion of his fellow creatures; if not by opinion, by the reproaches of
his own conscience. This seems the real turning point of the distinction
between morality and simple expediency. It is a part of the notion of
Duty in every one of its f