Fraternity, following lines whose general sense has been sufficiently indicated, has, in particular, established out of the common fund public education as a means of diffusing intellectual gain, which is the great element of growth even in efficient toil, and also of extending into all parts of the body politic a comprehension of the governmental scheme and the organized life of the community, fusing its separate interests in a mutual understanding and regard.  It has established, too, protection in the law, for the weak as against the strong, the poor as against the rich, the citizen as against those who would trustee the State for their own benefit; and, on the broad scale, it provides for the preservation of the public health, relief of the unfortunate, the care of all children, and in a thousand humane ways permeates the law with its salutary justice.  It has, again, in another great field, established toleration, not in religion merely, but of opinion and practice in general; and thereby largely has built up a mutual and pervading faith in the community as a body in all its parts and interests intending democratic results under human conditions; it has thus bred a habit of reserve at moments of hardship or grave difficulty,—­a respect that awaits social justice giving time for it to be brought about,—­which as a constituent of national character cannot be too highly prized.

The object of all government, and of every social system is, in its end and summary, to secure justice among mankind.  Justice is the most sacred word of men; but it is a thing hard to find.  Law, which is its social instrument, deals with external act, general conditions, and mankind in the mass.  It is not, like conscience, a searcher of men’s bosoms; its knowledge extends no farther than to what shall illuminate the nature of the event it examines; it makes no true ethical award.  It is in the main a method of procedure, largely inherited and wholly practical in intent, applied to recurring states of fact; it is a reasonable arrangement for the peaceful facilitation of human business of all social kinds; and to a considerable degree it is a convention, an agreement upon what shall be done in certain sets of circumstances, as an approximation, it may be, to justice, but, at all events, as an advantageous solution of difficulties.  This is as true of its criminal as of its civil branches.  Its concern is with society rather than the individual, and it sacrifices the individual to society without compunction, applying one rule to all alike, with a view to social, not individual, results, on the broad scale.  Those matters which make individual justice impossible,—­especially the element of personal responsibility in wrong-doing, how the man came to be what he is and his susceptibility to motives, to reason and to passion, in their varieties, and all such considerations,—­law ignores in the main question, however it may admit them in the imperfect form in which only they can be known,