contrary law meant right. But however this may be, the fact that _recht_
and _droit_ became restricted in their meaning to positive law, although
much which is not required by law is equally necessary to moral
straightness or rectitude, is as significant of the original character
of moral ideas as if the derivation had been the reverse way. The courts
of justice, the administration of justice, are the courts and the
administration of law. _La justice_, in French, is the established term
for judicature. There can, I think, be no doubt that the _idée mère_,
the primitive element, in the formation of the notion of justice, was
conformity to law. It constituted the entire idea among the Hebrews, up
to the birth of Christianity; as might be expected in the case of a
people whose laws attempted to embrace all subjects on which precepts
were required, and who believed those laws to be a direct emanation from
the Supreme Being. But other nations, and in particular the Greeks and
Romans, who knew that their laws had been made originally, and still
continued to be made, by men, were not afraid to admit that those men
might make bad laws; might do, by law, the same things, and from the
same motives, which, if done by individuals without the sanction of law,
would be called unjust. And hence the sentiment of injustice came to be
attached, not to all violations of law, but only to violations of such
laws as _ought_ to exist, including such as ought to exist but do not;
and to laws themselves, if supposed to be contrary to what ought to be
law. In this manner the idea of law and of its injunctions was still
predominant in the notion of justice, even when the laws actually in
force ceased to be accepted as the standard of it.

It is true that mankind consider the idea of justice and its obligations
as applicable to many things which neither are, nor is it desired that
they should be, regulated by law. Nobody desires that laws should
interfere with the whole detail of private life; yet every one allows