candidates for a Government employment. Impartiality, in short, as an
obligation of justice, may be said to mean, being exclusively influenced
by the considerations which it is supposed ought to influence the
particular case in hand; and resisting the solicitation of any motives
which prompt to conduct different from what those considerations would
dictate.

Nearly allied to the idea of impartiality, is that of _equality_; which
often enters as a component part both into the conception of justice and
into the practice of it, and, in the eyes of many persons, constitutes
its essence. But in this, still more than in any other case, the notion
of justice varies in different persons, and always conforms in its
variations to their notion of utility. Each person maintains that
equality is the dictate of justice, except where he thinks that
expediency requires inequality. The justice of giving equal protection
to the rights of all, is maintained by those who support the most
outrageous inequality in the rights themselves. Even in slave countries
it is theoretically admitted that the rights of the slave, such as they
are, ought to be as sacred as those of the master; and that a tribunal
which fails to enforce them with equal strictness is wanting in justice;
while, at the same time, institutions which leave to the slave scarcely
any rights to enforce, are not deemed unjust, because they are not
deemed inexpedient. Those who think that utility requires distinctions
of rank, do not consider it unjust that riches and social privileges
should be unequally dispensed; but those who think this inequality
inexpedient, think it unjust also. Whoever thinks that government is
necessary, sees no injustice in as much inequality as is constituted by
giving to the magistrate powers not granted to other people. Even among
those who hold levelling doctrines, there are as many questions of
justice as there are differences of opinion about expediency. Some