ich that of
every individual is included, set limits to the maxim; and those limits
ought to be strictly construed. As every other maxim of justice, so
this, is by no means applied or held applicable universally; on the
contrary, as I have already remarked, it bends to every person's ideas
of social expediency. But in whatever case it is deemed applicable at
all, it is held to be the dictate of justice. All persons are deemed to
have a _right_ to equality of treatment, except when some recognised
social expediency requires the reverse. And hence all social
inequalities which have ceased to be considered expedient, assume the
character not of simple inexpediency, but of injustice, and appear so
tyrannical, that people are apt to wonder how they ever could have been
tolerated; forgetful that they themselves perhaps tolerate other
inequalities under an equally mistaken notion of expediency, the
correction of which would make that which they approve seem quite as
monstrous as what they have at last learnt to condemn. The entire
history of social improvement has been a series of transitions, by which
one custom or institution after another, from being a supposed primary
necessity of social existence, has passed into the rank of an
universally stigmatized injustice and tyranny. So it has been with the
distinctions of slaves and freemen, nobles and serfs, patricians and
plebeians; and so it will be, and in part already is, with the
aristocracies of colour, race, and sex.

It appears from what has been said, that justice is a name for certain
moral requirements, which, regarded collectively, stand higher in the
scale of social utility, and are therefore of more paramount obligation,
than any others; though particular cases may occur in which some other
social duty is so important, as to overrule any one of the general
maxims of justice. Thus, to save a life, it may not only be allowable,
but a duty, to steal, or take by force, the necessary food or medicine,
or to kidnap, and compel to officiate, the only qualified medical
practitioner. In such cases, as we do not call anything justice which is
not a virtue, we usually say, not that justice must give way to some
other moral principle, but that what is just in ordinary cases is, by
reason of that other principle, not just in the particular case. By this
useful accommodation of language, the character of indefeasibility
attributed to justice is kept up, and we are saved from the