Daily inter mountain. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1881-1901, 1899-12-14
THE MEASURE NJ JUSTICE.

NousC. liz CIIdI oClcI VI III human Il1uu
makes it possible to draw conclusions
only from the nature of the impressions
received. When impressions are filtered
through the machinery of the brain they
natural developments of the mind that
receives them, and conclusions are drawn
from the sum total of ideas as mended
and classified by thisp process. 'Thus, the
man with benevolent and symfpathetic
faculties well developed sees justice in
the exercise of mercy, while the equally
conscientious individual with these quail
tiles poorly expressed finds in punish
ment the true function of Justice
What is true of the Individual is true
of nations. Questions which give rise to
war appeal to the people of different
nations from different standpoints of OBJ
servation, with the result that war is
entered upon in the holy name of justice
by all concerned. 81 IS
When Paris, the Trojan, stole the
handsome wife of a Greek friend some
1900 or 1 400 years before Christ, because
the goddess Venus had promised him the
handsomest woman in the world, the
Greeks got mad about it and arose in
their might and smote the Trojans.
Homer is authority for the statement
that the woman in the case was not the
unwilling victim of the Trojan Lothario,
and it was undoubtedly something in the
nature of a modern e~lopement, which
nowadays would have been settled in a
divorce court. The outraged husband
would have found a more attractive,
though perhaps a less handsome woman
than the original better half, and the in
cident would have been ended by an in
telligent jury. But the Greeks and the
Trojans believed that justice and the
gods were on their respective sides, and
after a var of ten years the Greeks
proved their point by being victorious.
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In later times, two p%otentates of Eu-
rope went to war over the ownership of
a we'll bucket, and it is supposed that
immutable justice again t~riun1phed.
though the Inter Mountain does not now
recall who got the bucket. In modern
times, as in the long ago, there has al
ways been two sides to every question
that has precipitated a war. The,impar-
tial student of history cannot fail to see
wherein each nation involved has had
good grounds for it's contention-from it's
own point of observation. t~,
By putting oneself into the shoes of
the respective combatants it is Il very
easy to figure out the justice of the posi-
ton taken, first by one side and then by
the other. This process of thought. how
ever, leads the student of the worlds af-
fairs to measure justice less from the i'm
mediate interests involved han from the
Ultimate effects of the controversy upon
mankind. On the principle that the rights
of the individual must be subordinated
to the rights of the masses, in order to
protect national life and all that it i'm
plies, SO must the exercise of the rights
of a nation conform to the higher rights
Of the world and the universal progress
of the age.
Were any nation of the present day to
support a ruler in the unlimited and bru-
tai exercise of arbitrary power, as in the
long ago, when the divine right of kings
was more to be respected than the divine
right of every human being to the fullest
liberty consistent with the rights of his
fellowmen, it would become involved in
a war that would wipe it off the geog-
raphy of the world. If thrones are totter-
ing at the close of the nineteenth century,
it is because this principle of universal
equality before the law has blossomed
into fruit in the hearts of men.
-
The idea of measuring justice by it's
effects has taken root in modern thought.
1t is this growth along a byohder line
that makes possible a blaze ofspublic in
terest over a Dreyfus trial-a growth that
reaches out for unitarian effects in'pub-
lie morals. To this sentiment is largely
due the sympathy that is expressed for
Great Britain in the South African con-
tesla sympathy that does not grow out
Of the national virtues of the mother
country, or a feeling that it is free from
blame in the roster of the worlds events,
but a consciousness that the Beers are
wrong in seeking to maintain al system of
rulership that is wholly inconsistent with
the rights of man, and which, If perpet-