What would be the consequences of such a perversion? It would require
volumes to describe them all. We must content ourselves with pointing
out the most striking.
In the first place, it would efface from everybody's conscience the
distinction between justice and injustice.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree,
but the safest way to make them respected is to make them respectable.
When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen
finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense,
or of losing his respect for the law--two evils of equal magnitude,
between which it would be difficult to choose.
It is so much in the nature of law to support justice, that in the minds
of the masses they are one and the same. There is in all of us a strong
disposition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so much so, that
many falsely derive all justice from law. It is sufficient, then, for
the law to order and sanction plunder, that it may appear to many
consciences just and sacred. Slavery, protection, and monopoly find
defenders, not only in those who profit by them, but in those who suffer
by them. If you suggest a doubt as to the morality of these
institutions, it is said directly--"You are a dangerous innovator, a
utopian, a theorist, a despiser of the laws; you would shake the basis
upon which society rests.
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