ABSTRACT
There are two chief offices, long performed by parents and elders, that grow into distinct departments of government: to administer justice and to wage war. Ideally an appeal to justice takes the place of some imminent appeal to force, as if the sense of equity in the judges, who may be the crowd present at the quarrel, would bring the virtual force of the community to the rescue of the side that had been wronged. In practice, however, especially when precedents or laws can be invoked to influence the judgment, the sense of justice itself expresses a vested economic or ambitious interest, an established domination, not founded on fairness but on force; so that the force of law appears to the free mind as itself a brutal force. And there is another element of judiciary justice when long established that, without being economic, seems to the free mind an imposition; and this is the element of mere custom or superstition that enters into the traditional law. It may require military force to eradicate this legal tradition; since economic domination, if firmly established, can remake legality, if not equity, in its own interests.
