Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/203

Rh the two agree in this conception of what is just. At a later stage of the inquiry, Glaucon, describing a current opinion, says:

"This, as they affirm, is the origin and nature of justice:—there is a mean or compromise between the best of all, which is to do and not to suffer injustice, and the worst of all, which is to suffer without the power of retaliation; and justice being the mean between the two, is tolerated not as good, but as the lesser evil." And immediately afterward it is said that men "are only diverted into the path of justice by the force of law."

In this significant passage several things are to be noted. There is first a recognition of the fact, above indicated, that at an early stage the practice of justice is initiated by the dread of retaliation, and the conviction, suggested by experience, that it is on the whole the best to avoid aggression and to respect the limit which compromise implies; there is no recognition of intrinsic flagitiousness in aggression, but only of its impolicy. Further, the limit to each man's actions, described as "a mean of compromise," and respect for which is called "the path of justice," is said to be established only "by the force of law." Law is not considered as an expression of justice otherwise cognizable, but as itself the source of justice; and hence results the meaning of the preceding proposition, that it is just to obey the law. Thirdly, there is an implication that were it not for retaliation and legal penalties, the stronger might with propriety take advantage of the weaker. There is a half-expressed belief that superiority ought to have the advantages of superiority; inequality occupies a prominent place, while equality makes no definite appearance.

The conception here indicated that justice consists in legality, is, toward the close of Book IV, developed into the conception that justice consists "in each of the three classes doing the work of its own class": carpenter, shoemaker, or what not, "doing each his own business, and not another's"; and all obeying the class whose business it is to rule. Thus the idea of justice is made to include the idea of inequality. Though there is some