only qualified medical practitioner. In such cases, as we do not
call anything justice which is not a virtue, we usually say, not
that justice must give way to some other moral principle, but that
what is just in ordinary cases is, by reason of that other
principle, not just in the particular case. By this useful
accommodation of language, the character of indefeasibility attributed
to justice is kept up, and we are saved from the necessity of
maintaining that there can be laudable injustice.

  The considerations which have now been adduced resolve, I
conceive, the only real difficulty in the utilitarian theory of
morals. It has always been evident that all cases of justice are
also cases of expediency: the difference is in the peculiar
sentiment which attaches to the former, as contradistinguished from
the latter. If this characteristic sentiment has been sufficiently
accounted for; if there is no necessity to assume for it any
peculiarity of origin; if it is simply the natural feeling of
resentment, moralised by being made coextensive with the demands of
social good; and if this feeling not only does but ought to exist in
all the classes of cases to which the idea of justice corresponds;
that idea no longer presents itself as a stumbling-block to the
utilitarian ethics.

  Justice remains the appropriate name for certain social utilities
which are vastly more important, and therefore more absolute and
imperative, than any others are as a class (though not more so than
others may be in particular cases); and which, therefore, ought to be,
as well as naturally are, guarded by a sentiment not only different in
degree, but also in kind; distinguished from the milder feeling
which attaches to the mere idea of promoting human pleasure or
convenience, at once by the more definite nature of its commands,
and by the sterner character of its sanctions.

                                    THE END
.