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THE chestnut boughs are all aglow; The gorse illumes the fells ; The hawthorns bend 'neath summer snow; The skylarks chant their triumph strains High in the blue above; The throstles join in loud refrains In every vale and grove; And blackbirds in a happy mood Sing on from dawn to gray, And wake the wind-flowers in the wood A scented wealth of bloom is spread The long day comes in gold and red, Flit o'er the heather gay; Like jets of flame the marsh flowers rise ON A ROMAN CAMP. HERE on this brow the Roman eagle made Her eyrie; hence she watched the wide champaign, And, taming the rude dwellers on the plain, Stablished that power which the world obeyed ; And hence the swart Italian, who had strayed Far from his home in sunnier Italy, Looked down with home-sick eye, and wept to see Bleak dreary wastes, that knew not axe or spade. That day hath passed for aye; and whoso stands Hereon, doth see no more the woods and heaths That lay of old beneath the sway of Rome, But corn and harvest, and green pasture lands Dotted with flocks and herds, and circling wreaths Of blue smoke over many a quiet home. Chambers' Journal. R. C. K. ENSOR. From The New Review. It is a common opinion that it is as easy to be just, if your sympathies are not in the least engaged either way, as it is to walk. So it is, in one sense. To learn to walk takes the ordinary human being from one to two years of constant and assiduous endeavor, and that with the advantage of ever-present examples, and no small amount of help and encouragement. Also, some people never learn to walk well. Many of us, if we tried as hard to learn the art of justice as we try to learn the art of walking, might be blessed with a similarly considerable degree of success, but most of us will never do anything of the kind, and, in fact, justice is a thing that most of us know very little about. of her young child. It is my belief that every woman under whose notice the case came expressed the opinion that the convict ought to have been sentenced to penal servitude for life, and supported that assertion by statements the irrelevancy and the untrustworthiness of which proved the speaker to have no conception of any principle of justice whatever. It is not to be supposed that because all women are unjust, all men are just. That is not at all the case. Many men are as unjust as all women. It may be that some men are just by nature, as some men are bowlers or billiard players by nature, and others eloquent or truthful. I, however, incline rather to the opinion that this is not so, or is so only in rare instances, and that as a rule, if not invariably, no man is or can be just who has not acquired, somehow or other, an elaborate education in the art. It has also one striking and romantic feature. It is an art known almost exclusively to persons of the male sex. The popular misconception on the Generalizations to the effect that men, subject appears to be based upon a peror women, are all so-and-so, or always, nicious theory that everybody "ought" or never, do this or that, are as com- to be "equal," in all manner of advanmon as blackberries, but in my experi- tageous and disadvantageous circumence they are generally erroneous. stances, to everybody else. "It is not For instance, it is proverbial that curi- fair," say women, and other unjust osity, or inquisitiveness, is a distinctly persons, that one man should be strong, feminine attribute. I do not believe it young, rich, handsome, clever, a duke, in the least. A man can usually be and everything else that any one could teased just as effectively by references wish for, and that another should ento something he does not know, as any joy no one of those happy chances. woman in the world. So with the kind This impious contention, of course, of pride called vanity. It is possible follows logically from almost any one that I may, from want of experience, of the common complaints about the underrate the ravages of this weakness" injustice" of the arrangements of in the female mind, but if any women the universe. The fact is that, most are vainer than some men, I can neither likely, nobody was ever absolutely equal understand nor imagine how they man- in anything to anybody else, and, thereage it. Justice, however, does seem to fore, the assertion that people ought" supply a distinctive line identical with to be equal in any specific respect, is, that between the sexes. I never knew in reality, only a way of saying that the a woman who either was just, or universe is made otherwise, and thereseemed to have any conception of what fore worse than the speaker would have justice was, and I do not believe there made it, and is, therefore, badly made. is one in the world. I do not mean to To complain that the universe is badly suggest that the fact is lamentable, but made is to confess oneself to be, to merely that it is the fact, and that it is some extent, unfit to live in this part noteworthy. A lady was sentenced a of it, which is a cowardly and degradfew years ago to a term of imprison- ing admission. The duty of an honorment for unlawfully causing the deathable and self-respecting human being 66 is clearly to make the best of the laws than the law of gravitation, are universe, such as it is. Before demonstrating that justice is an art to be learnt, and not a manifest principle to be applied without instruction, it is expedient to indicate shortly something of the meaning of the word. To begin with, the word means, etymologically, the science, or practice, of laws or rules. "Lawishness would be an ugly, but intelligible and instructive equivalent. It would be true, in the strict sense, to say that there was no such thing as justice, apart from positive laws, that is, apart from commands given by intelligent beings who have some power of enforcing them, to intelligent beings who can understand them, and are under some compulsion to obey them. If the word law is here used in the strictest sense of jurisprudence, there is no justice except such as is administered by the sovereigns in sovereign States to the subject individuals in those States. This, however, is far too narrow and confined a sense for the general use of the word. It has, in ordinary language, a much wider significance, and may be correctly used wherever, by any reasonably close analogy, the word law can be applied to any rule of conduct, or even to any sequence of events which is sufficiently regular to be conceived of as proceeding in obedience to a command. "The laws of Nature" are sequences of events which it is highly convenient to speak of as laws, and no confusion need arise from the use of that expression if it is remembered that they are not laws at all in the strict sense, and that they differ from laws proper above all in this, that it is, as far as we know, utterly impossible to disobey them. A man may break the law which forbids him to commit murder, and may, or may not, be hung for it; but he cannot, however hard he tries, break the "law" of gravitation, which "says" that the mass of the earth and the mass of his body shall tend to approach each other at a certain speed proportioned to the distance that separates them. Less of laws than the queen's statutes, and more of the laws which require people to behave affectionately to their mothers, respectfully to their uncles, and kindly to their dependents; that which or dains the observance of treaty obligations with weaker powers, and that which says that you must pay your gambling losses. Justice, then, may, I think, be fairly described, as the science of making laws, both laws strictly so called and what are described as laws by a fairly close analogy, and the art of correctly ascertaining, and properly administering, the laws which, in one way or another, have come into existence. It will probably conduce to the popularity, without, I hope, seriously impairing the accuracy, of this definition to leave the word law out of it altogether, and to say, in looser phrase, that justice is the proper management of the rules according to which any given part of the business of life may, in fact, and properly, be carried on. From rules, or laws, of some sort or other, there is practically no escape. The rules of something, of fashion if of nothing else, affect everybody, whatever they are doing. Or, if not if there are any solitary and exceptional pursuits of which so much cannot be said then, at any rate, the conceptions of justice and injustice, of fair and unfair, have no place in their discussion. The most slovenly and inaccurate of mankind would call it "unfair" that a particular man should have only one leg, unless he was of opinion that some, if not most, other men had each two. The fundamental error lying at the root of the ordinary misconceptions about justice, probably is that justice demands the equal treatment of everybody; that is, in substance, that the inequalities with everybody else, which are part of everybody's natural endowment, shall, as far as they affect the matters in question, be "levelled up " or " down," as the case may be, so as to produce, as nearly as is practically possible, equality of condition in the result. If this were so, the task of 1 1 deciding what was just in any particu- | justice will be done, if it be adminislar matter would be hopelessly impos-tered alike to each, however much, and sible. Many human advantages and for whatever reasons, the person or disadvantages are absolutely incom- persons administering it may wish to mensurable, and many of them are related to each other in such different degrees, and so indefinitely, that a fair appraisement of them all in the simplest matter would involve inquiries much too long and elaborate to be conducted while human life is of anything like its present brevity. promote the welfare of one, and inflict disadvantages upon the other. A. may be much richer, and able to bribe his judges, or (what is usually more to the purpose nowadays), may be much poorer, and the sort of person whose success will provoke a gush of enthusiasm in the newspapers; one or the One case of such a difficulty is of other may be in private relations with constant occurrence. Crimes almost those who have to put the rules in exactly similar are committed by two force; it may be abundantly clear that persons, one a man hitherto respect- by some code of rules not immediately able, born and bred in cultivated so- in question, such as the rules of ordiciety, and accustomed to soft living; nary morality, or those of sportsmanthe other, a low-born and ruffianly gaol-like behavior, A. is incomparably more bird. A punishment of the kind usual deserving than B., while B., with fiendin case of such offences say twelve ish cunning, has so behaved as to have months' hard labor will be a crushing and irreparable disaster to the former, inflicting upon him, while it lasts, discomfort almost amounting to torture, and involving absolute ruin for the future. To the latter it will be a tiresome, but not unprecedented episode, involving no permanent diminution of resources, reputation, or selfrespect. Are they both to have twelve months, or is the gentleman to have less? What does justice demand? This particular question is one upon which those of her Majesty's judges who sit in criminal courts are not by any means agreed, and it is manifest to any one who will attentively consider it that it is not to be hastily or confidently answered. People are infinitely different, and cannot all be treated alike. Therefore to identify justice with equal treatment is either to deprive the word of any meaning, or to apply it to a thing which does not, and never can, exist. on his side the particular set of rules which does apply, and no other "merits" whatsoever; A. may have the sympathy of every decent person, and B. may be the fitting target of universal and miscellaneous obloquy — nay, if the law of the land happens not to be in question, he may be evidently guilty, in relation to the disputed circumstances, of forgery, theft, swindling, and other hateful offences-all these things are immaterial. If the person who has to decide is just, and the particular set of rules that he has to act upon establish the rectitude, pro hac vice, of B., he will decide in favor of B., and let the other matters take care of themselves. Its in The notion that, apart from personal prejudices and so forth, it is easy to be just, is, as I have already observed, both common and erroneous. accuracy may easily be demonstrated by reference to a few of the commonplaces of the subject. Such a simple. Yet this common error-like most matter as seeing two sides of a question - has something in it is not one that comes by nature to that is laudable, for the people who many people; and even when you do make it have got hold of part of the see two sides, the one that appears truth. Justice does not, indeed, con- first (or, in certain cross-grained persist in equal treatment, but it does con- sons, the one that appears last) has, as sist in equal application of the rules as a rule, a considerable advantage. A far as they go. If it is clear that the pleasing example of this occurs in rule applies both to A. and to B., then Thackeray's admirable "Ballad of common errors |