JUSTICE ACCORDING TO LAW. 297 this or that citizen. Further, some conflict between legal and moral justice can hardly be avoided, for morality and law cannot move at exactly the same rate. Still in a well ordered State such conflict is exceptional, and seldom acute. Legal justice aims at realizing moral justice within its range, and its strength largely consists in the general feeling that this is so. Were the legal formulation of right permanently estranged from the moral judg- ment of good citizens, the State would be divided kgainst itself We may better realize the fundamental character of law by try- ing to conceive its negation or opposite. This will be found, it is submitted, in the absence of order rather than in the absence of compulsion. An exercise of merely capricious power, however great in relation to that which it acts upon, does not satisfy the general conception of law, whether it does or does not fit the words of any artificial definition. A despotic chief who paid no atten- tion to anything but his own whim of the moment could hardly be said to administer justice, even if he professed to decide the dis- putes of his subjects. The best ideal picture I know in literature of what might be called natural injustice, the mere wantonness of power, is exhibited in the ways of Setebos as conceived by Robert Browning's "Caliban": ** As it likes me each time I do : so He." In the same master's " Pippa Passes," the song of the ancient king, who judged sitting in the sun, gives a more pleasing, though not a more perfect, image of natural or rather patriarchal justice. Ab- sence of defined rule, it must be remembered, is not the same thing as the negation of order. The patriarch may not do justice ac- cording to any consciously realized rule, and yet his decrees are felt to be just, and will go to the making of rules of justice for posterity. It is true that even in highly civilized States we meet with occa- sional or singular acts of sovereign power which are outside the regular course of justice and administration, and which neverthe- less must be counted as laws. In form they do not differ from the ordinary acts of the law-making authority, and in substance they are laws in so far as they affect in some way the standing of indi- vidual citizens before the law, must be regarded and acted upon by the judges and other public servants of the State, and will at need be put in force by the executive. In some of these cases there is really nothing abnormal except the form of the transaction. What began with being a special exercise of supreme power for a special occasion has settled into a routine which, though in form
