today highly civilized nations find deceptions of many sorts profitable
to them, nor are such generally condemned. [Footnote: WESTERMARCK, II,
chapters xxx and xxxi.]

What modern government does not employ secret service agents, and value
them in proportion to the degree of skill with which they manage to
deceive their fellows, while limiting the exercise of professional good
faith to their intercourse with their paymaster? The secret service agent
of transparent frankness, who could not bear to deceive his neighbor,
would not hold his post for a day. He would be a subject for Homeric
laughter.

Moreover, if the question may be raised: what constitutes justice? may
one not equally well ask: what constitutes veracity or its opposite?
Where does the silence of indifference shade into purposed concealment,
and the latter into what is unequivocally deception? At what point does
deception blossom out into the unmistakable lie? One may take advantage
of an accidental misunderstanding of what one has said; one may use
ambiguous language; one may point instead of speaking. Between going
about with a head of glass, with all one's thoughts displayed as in a
show-case to every comer, and the settled purpose to deceive by the
direct verbal falsification, there is a long series of intermediate
positions. The commercial maxim that one is not bound to teach the man
with whom one is dealing how to conduct his business, and the lawyer's
dictum that the advocate is under no obligation to put himself in the
position of the judge, obviously, will bear much stretching.

6. THE CODES OF COMMUNITIES: THE COMMON GOOD.--Nor are the facts which
confront us less perplexing when we turn to that "regard to the common
good" which Butler finds to be acknowledged and enforced by the primary