this formal criterion grows. The uniform and just application of law becomes so important that the imperfect law whose just application is secured is preferred to the more perfect and materially more just law whose application varies, becomes uncertain and thus unjust everywhere or in the hands of judges and officials of to-day. Nearly all positive law, therefore, and especially written law, which the thinking mind generates by the machinery of legislation, which has not as customary law been derived from use, is inflexible, feeble, confined to outward, clearly visible marks; it cannot regard individualities and their natures, it deals with rough averages. Instead of testing individuals, for example, it divides adults and minors according to a fixed age, approximately correct for the totality, but more or less arbitrary in regard to the individual. It calls all adult men to the polls, not because they are really of equal importance to the commonwealth, but because the application of every more complicated distinction would result practically in greater injustices. Thus law becomes often inequitable and materially unjust, not because formal justice is superior, but because it is more easily attained in the existing stage of civilization. This gives rise to thousands of conflicts between material and formal justice, which are so often decisive for the practical questions of distribution of wealth and incomes.

If there is any demand of justice which it is desired to introduce into our institutions through the channel of ordinary reform by positive law, it is not only necessary that the demand be recognized and desired by the best as right, that it must have become custom in certain places, that it must have overcome the resisting powers of egoism, of listless indolence which clings to tradition, that it should have triumphed over the eventual obstruction of the other ethical ideas, which tending toward other goals, often may be an obstacle, that it should have become a dogma of ruling parties and statesmen. No, it must also have evolved the qualities of a practicable formal law, it must have reached fixed boundaries, clear characteristics, determined qualities and proportions; it must have traversed the long journey from a conception of right to a clearly defined and limited provision of law, the fundamental judgments of value must be condensed to a fixed conventional scale, which, as a simple expression of complicated and manifold conditions still grasps their average justly. In short the mechanism of positive law limits every execution of material justice. We have our formal right only at the expense of a partial material injustice.

A demand of justice in rewarding great inventors can to-day only become positive law in patent legislation, or in the public arrangement of a system of premiums, in which the method of execution is just as important as the principle. A demand of justice in regard to a progressive income tax can count upon sympathy only when the demand is based on definite figures which correspond to the average feeling of right of to-day. The demand of justice that the employer should provide better for his laborers becomes practicable, when we demand in detail and definitely that the employer carry this or that responsibility for accidents, that he put such and such a contribution into the benefit fund, that he accept the verdict of umpires with regard to wages. That the laborers should share in the profits of the enterprise can be discussed as a legal measure only when definite experience shows the possibility of a just execution. Otherwise such a law, like many other well-meant propositions for the improvement of the condition of the lower classes, would, in consequence of the violation of formal justice, lead to arbitrariness, to favoritism, to the discontent of the classes concerned. This is confirmed by all deeper knowledge of the results of the administration of our poor laws. The poor law is the most important piece of socialism which the German social organization contains. It is a piece of socialism which we could not spare for the time being, because we do not know a better substitute, nor yet how to meet otherwise by more perfect institutions the inevitable demand of justice, that every fellow-being be protected from starvation. The drawback of this poor law is the absolute impossibility of enforcing it in a formally and materially just way. Arbitrariness, chance, red tape govern it, and therefore the assistance given has in many cases such unfavorable psychological effects, leading to laziness and indifference. As long as the organs of the administration do not reach a far higher perfection, as long as the formal possibilities of execution are not quite different, most socialistic experiments would only extend the consequences of our poor laws to large areas of our social and economic organization.

But we must never forget the distinction between means and ends. The form of the law is the means, justice, however, the end. We may perceive that laws cannot do away with every immorality, cannot effect a strictly just distribution of incomes; that the ingenious tricks of astute and selfish business men flout all decency, and find ways to slip through the meshes of the best laws. But this must not restrain us from working for justice, and from faith in its victory, Although thousands of injustices are bound to occur in our life, our best possession rests on the idea of justice. All social progress depends on further victories of justice. By demanding a just distribution of incomes, socialism has introduced nothing new, but has in contrast to the errors' which were created by materialistic epigones in a short period of so-called philosophy of enlightenment, only returned to the great traditions of all idealistic social philosophy. The error of socialism was simply that it overlooked the difference between material and formal justice, as well as the significance of other equally justified social ideal conceptions; that it imagined the individual conceptions of certain idealists of what is just, would suffice to overthrow suddenly and immediately primeval institutions. With its crude excrescences it returned to standards of justice which perhaps correspond to the first stages of civilization, certainly to rough views, but not to refined conceptions of higher morality.

Socialism can teach us not to demand a false justice; it should never hinder us from fighting for a true justice. History tells us that progress has usually been tedious; it shows us just as much that at length the greatest formal difficulties have been overcome; that especially in the great epochs of faith in ideals which rejuvenate and ennoble men, the juster right, the refined morals have triumphed over the powers of egoism, of sluggishness, of stupidity, and now better and juster institutions have grown up. There was a time when the demand for a just system of trade, which is universally conceded to-day, appeared as an ideal far in advance of the times. Robberies, thefts, frauds, brawls in the market-places, extortions of gifts were the older forms of transferring property. Here a thousand years' work in civilization has developed, in connection with the progress of refined conceptions of justice, the institutions of law, which to-day govern and bind all intercourse as a matter of

course.

The leading conceptions in this work of civilization in the past and present do naturally not relate to the whole society and all its purposes, nor to all qualities of men. In every ordinary barter two persons, whose other qualities are not concerned in this relation, which is confined to this one barter, meet with the purpose of advancing their mutual interests by the exchange of certain goods. This result is reached if they exchange values essentially equal, if both sides make equal profits. "The giving and the taking," Herbart says,

everywhere presupposes compensation, i. e., equality of the given and the taken." Concerning the standards of equality only, can there be any dissent. The savage sees equality in purely external circumstances, in the fact that the furs just fill the kettle for which he trades them. The civilized man asks for equality of money value, the formalist for the equal absence of fraud, force and error. The principle however, always remains the same. Equality measured in some way is required. And if the equality of both sides required by the conventional standard exists, justice is secured because the logical judgment and the moral test does not bring the single agreement into 'relation with the total distribution of incomes, with the total worthiness of the persons. Only a fool could require as a demand of justice, that the grocer grade the price of a pound of coffee according to the wealth of each customer, or that in a publishing contract the publisher should pay to the author of an unsalable scientific book a large sum because it is a work of great labor and skill. The justice of a single bargain is the so-called exchanging justice, as Trendelenburg in his admirable essays on Aristotle has proved to be the real meaning of the great Stagaryte. This exchanging justice is nevertheless not in strict contrast to distributive justice; it is only one of its subdivisions, which concerns not the whole society and all its purposes, but simply a part of them and an especial purpose.

As long as the value of every good thing is a different one for each man, so long a certain inequality of profits will not seem unjust, Only when this equality oversteps certain bounds, when its cause is not the free decision of a free man, does a lively feeling of injustice arise and seek a legal remedy. For thousands of years the selfish impulses of those who in the social struggle of competition are the stronger, have demanded unconditional freedom of contract; and this demand is always opposed by public conscience and the demand of the weaker, which establishes the conception of justum pretium, which requires a governmental regulation of prices, statutes on usury, consideration for the "læsio enormis," public control of abuses in trade and traffic, a restriction of exploitation. This requirement disappears only when two real equals meet, who as a rule derive equal benefit from their commercial relations.

The older economic school of Adam Smith, as we suggested in our introduction, had found its ideal of justice