Page:Social Justice without Socialism.djvu/35

 Social justice demands some effective means of getting legal justice. We have courts, certainly. Do they give the service that we need and, in particular, do they give it to the poor? We do not here impugn the motives of judges. Generally speaking, they are honest; but the whole system of court procedure is hampered by detailed statutes and technical rules, that mean an amount of cost and delay which in itself is the very quintessence of injustice. A citizen is offered a choice between submitting to the wrong inflicted by a fellow-citizen and accepting the wrong inflicted by a dilatory and crushingly costly legal procedure. We probably excel some nations in the rightfulness of the decisions we