ed, too, protection in
the law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor as against the
rich, the citizen as against those who would trustee the State for their
own benefit; and, on the broad scale, it provides for the preservation
of the public health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all
children, and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with its
salutary justice. It has, again, in another great field, established
toleration, not in religion merely, but of opinion and practice in
general; and thereby largely has built up a mutual and pervading faith
in the community as a body in all its parts and interests intending
democratic results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit of
reserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty,--a respect that
awaits social justice giving time for it to be brought about,--which as
a constituent of national character cannot be too highly prized.

The object of all government, and of every social system is, in its end
and summary, to secure justice among mankind. Justice is the most sacred
word of men; but it is a thing hard to find. Law, which is its social
instrument, deals with external act, general conditions, and mankind in
the mass. It is not, like conscience, a searcher of men's bosoms; its
knowledge extends no farther than to what shall illuminate the nature of
the event it examines; it makes no true ethical award. It is in the main
a method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly practical in intent,
applied to recurring states of fact; it is a reasonable arrangement for
the peaceful facilitation of human business of all social kinds; and to
a considerable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon what shall
be done in certain sets of circumstances, as an approximation, it may
be, to justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous solution of
difficulties. This is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches.
Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it
sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one
rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on
the broad scale. Those matters which make individual justice
impossible,--especially the element of personal responsibility in
wrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility to
motives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all such
considerations,--law ignores in the main question, however it may admit