Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/16

6 Already they have been implied and comprehended under the administration of justice; but so vaguely is the meaning of this phrase commonly conceived that a more specific statement must he made. Justice, then, as here to be understood, means preservation of the normal connections between acts and results—the obtainment by each of as much benefit as his efforts are equivalent to no—more and no less. Living and working within the restraints imposed by one another's presence, justice requires that individuals shall severally take the consequences of their conduct, neither increased nor decreased. The superior shall have the good of his superiority, and the inferior the evil of his inferiority. A veto is therefore put on all public action which abstracts from some men part of the advantages they have earned and awards to other men advantages they have not earned.

That from the developed industrial type of society there are excluded all forms of communistic distribution, the inevitable trait of which is that they tend to equalize the lives of good and bad, idle and diligent, is readily proved. For, when, the struggle for existence between societies by war having ceased, there remains only the industrial struggle for existence, the final survival and spread must be on the part of those societies which produce the largest number of the best individuals—individuals best adapted for life in the industrial state. Suppose two societies, otherwise equal, in one of which the superior are allowed to retain, for their own benefit and the benefit of their offspring, the entire proceeds of their labor, but in the other of which the superior have taken from them part of these proceeds for the benefit of the inferior and their offspring. Evidently the superior will thrive and multiply more in the first than in the second. A greater number of the best children will be reared in the first, and eventually it will outgrow the second.

Otherwise regarded, this system, under which the efforts of each bring neither more nor less than their natural returns, is the system of contract.

We have seen that the régime of status is in all ways proper to the militant type. It is the concomitant of that graduated subordination by which the combined action of a fighting body is achieved, and which must pervade the fighting society at large to insure its corporate action. Under this régime, the relation between labor and produce is traversed by authority. As in the army, the food, clothing, etc., received by each soldier are not direct returns for work done, but