§ 4.

But if we are not as yet capable of entirely fulfilling the perfect law, and if our inability renders needful certain supplementary Edition: current; Page: [467] regulations, then, are not these supplementary regulations, in virtue of their beneficial effects, ethically justifiable? and if the abolition of them, on the ground that they conflict with abstract morality, would be disadvantageous, then, are they not of higher authority, for the time being, than the moral law itself?—must not the relatively right take precedence of the positively right?

The confident air with which this question seems to claim an affirmative answer is somewhat rashly assumed. It is not true that the arrangement best adapted to the time, possesses, in virtue of its adaptation, any independent authority. Its authority is not original, but derived. Whatsoever respect is due to it, is due to it only as a partial embodiment of the moral law. The whole benefit conferred by it is attributable to the fulfilment of that portion of the moral law which it enforces For consider the essential nature of all advantages obtained by any such arrangement. The use of every institution is to aid men in the achievement of happiness. Happiness consists in the due exercise of faculties. Hence an institution suited to the time, must be one which in some way or other ensures to men more facility for the exercise of faculties—that is, greater freedom for such exercise—than they would enjoy without it. Thus, if it be asserted of a given people that a despotism is at present the best form of government for them, it is meant that the exercise of faculties is less limited under a despotism, than it would be limited under the anarchical state entailed by any other form of government; and that, therefore, despotism gives to such a people an amount of liberty to exercise the faculties greater than they would possess in its absence. Similarly, all apologies that can be made for a narrow suffrage, for censorship of the press, for restraint by passports, and the like, resolve themselves into assertions that the preservation of public order necessitates these restrictions—that social dissolution would ensue on their abolition—that there would arise a state of universal aggression by men on each other—or, in other words, that the law of equal freedom is less violated by the maintenance Edition: current; Page: [468] of these restrictions, than it would be violated were they repealed.

If, then, the only excuse to be made for measures of temporary expediency is, that they get the commands of the moral law fulfilled better than any other measures can, their authority may no more be compared with that of the moral law itself, than the authority of a servant with that of a master. Whilst a conductor of force is inferior to a generator of it—whilst an instrument is inferior to the will which guides it, so long must an institution be inferior to the law whose ends it subserves, and so long must such institution bend to that law as the agent to his principal.

And here let it be remarked, that we shall avoid much confusion by ceasing to use the word right in any but its legitimate sense; that, namely, in which it describes conduct purely moral. Rightness expresses of actions, what straightness does of lines; and there can no more be two kinds of right action than there can be two kinds of straight line. If we would keep our conclusions free from ambiguity, we must reserve the term we employ to signify absolute rectitude, solely for this purpose. And when it is needful to express the claims of imperfect, though beneficial, institutions, we must speak of them, not as “relatively right,” or “right for the time being,” but as the least wrong institutions now possible.