There was nobody born, and nobody wed;
This world was a world of the living-dead.

I longed to hear the Time-Clock strike
In the world where the people were all alike;
I hated Same, I hated For-Ever,

I longed to say Neither, or even Never.

I longed to mend, I longed to make,
I longed to give, I longed to take,
I longed for a change, whatever came after,
I longed for crying, I longed for laughter.

At last I heard the Time-Clock boom,
And woke from my dream in my little room;
With a smile on her lips my mother was nigh,
And I heard the baby crow and cry.

And I thought to myself, How nice it is
For me to live in a world like this,

Where things can happen, and clocks can strike,
And none of the people are made alike;
Where Love wants this, and Pain wants that,

And all our hearts want Tit for Tat

In the jumbles we make with our heads and our hands,

In a world that nobody understands,

But with work, and hope, and the right to call
Upon Him who sees it, and knows us all.

L

XI

Justice, Mercy, Charity

THESE three words are very frequently used in books, newspapers, and speech of different kinds, and as the way in which they are used gave me a great deal of trouble when I was a boy, it is no doubt the same with some other young people. At all events, our 'piece of string' would be too short to tie up all the sticks to which it will have to be applied, if we did not say something about Justice, Mercy. and Charity.

When we speak of a court of justice, of bringing a man to justice, of a man being justly (or unjustly) condemned, we are of course thinking of what we spoke of under the head of Government. If a man has broken one of the public rules,

that is, laws, of which we made mention, we mean that it is just that he should bear the punishment named by the law ; and that is what we call doing justice. We also call it doing justice, or being just, when we pay what we owe or fulfil a bargain. It is very seldom, indeed, that the fulfilling of a bargain can be wrong,it is nearly always a high duty,—but yet it might sometimes be unjust. For instance, if I were a surgeon, and had promised to go and set a broken arm at a given time for such and such a fee, but were to hear, on my way to this patient, that another had just split an artery, and was bleeding away towards death, it would be just that I should go first and tie up the artery, even though I broke my promise to the man with the injured arm. It would be just, because it would be treating things according to their proportions, or as they really are; but it is still simpler to say it would be Right-a word which takes in mercy and justice, and charity too. We shall

come back to this word right' in a

minute.

But though it is so very, very seldom right to break a bargain, that we can almost say it is never right, it would rather more frequently be right to break or pass by, the laws or rules as to punishment, if it could be done with safety. In school or home-life this is done, and it is safe, because the parent or the schoolmaster knows all about the offence and the offender; no, not all, but enough to guide him better than a magistrate or judge can be guided. It is very easy to see that you cannot possibly make laws that shall always be just. If a man kills another, really meaning to do it outright, it is murder, and he is liable to be put to death under our laws. If a man who has money neglects to supply, we will say, his poor mother with food, or does not give her enough, and she dies, he is not liable to be put to death-it would be impossible, for reasons that would take long to tell, to make laws

which would deal justly with every case of the kind. Yet here everybody calls it just to hang the man who has committed the murder, and let off with a long imprisonment the man who has not taken care of his mother. And it is just-in the sense that it is keeping to what the law says; and it is right, too, or at least may be right; because if we were always altering the law at our own pleasure, nobody would know what to expect from it, and so we should be farther than ever from what is just.

There are other ways in which what we call justice cannot always be just. The law usually gives the judge power to make a punishment lighter or severer according to what he thinks of the guilty person; for instance, it says that if a man does so and so, the judge shall have him put in prison for not less than three months, and not more than twelve. Thus, if a man that was half-starving stole something, he would not be as severely punished as if he