Social justice asks
neither charity nor mercy, but such conditions, embodied in institutions
and laws, as shall diminish, so far as under nature and human nature is
possible, the differences of men at birth, and in their education, and
in their opportunity through life, to the end that all citizens shall be
equal in the power to begin and conduct their lives in morals, industry,
and the hope of happiness. Social justice, so defined, under temporal
conditions, democracy seeks as the sum and substance of its effort in
governmental ways; some advance has been made; but it requires no wide
survey, nor long examination, to see that what has been accomplished is
a beginning, with the end so far in the future as to seem a dream, such
as the poets have sung almost from the dawn of hope. What matters it? It
is not only poets who dream; justice is the statesman's dream.
Such in bold outline are the principles of democracy. They have been
working now for a century in a great nation, not wholly unfettered and
on a complete scale even with us, but with wider acceptance and broader
application than elsewhere in the world, and with most prosperity in
those parts of the country where they are most mastering; and the nation
has grown great in their charge.
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