The right man in the right place, the great statesman and reformer, the far-seeing party chief and legislator can here accomplish extraordinary things, not directly, not immediately, but through a wise and just transformation of the economic institutions they can greatly influence the administration of incomes and property. Of course, the theory which sees only natural processes in all economic life admits this as little as those who from the standpoint of certain class interests, from conviction of principle, or even from mere shortsightedness constantly recur to the impotency of the State. Statesmen of a lower order also talk with eunuchs' voices of the inability of the State to interfere anywhere; they mistake their own impotency for that of the State. All these adverse opinions forget that the State is and must be the leading intelligence, the responsible centre of public sentiment, the acme of existing moral and intellectual powers, and therefore can attain great results in this direction.
We do not demand that any leading personalities, like a human omnipotence, should control, compare, examine and estimate the qualities and achievements of millions, and accordingly distribute incomes justly. This is a conception of folly which reasonable socialists now abandon. The State can at all times chiefly influence a juster distribution of income by means of improved social institutions. Only in this way is it guaranteed against having its best intentions destroyed by a thousandfold formal injustice. The total of economic institutions will always be more important than the insight and intention of those who for the time being govern in the central administration, be they the greatest of men. Their wisdom and justice can promote and reform the institutions, but cannot take their place. They will prove themselves true benefactors of humanity only by fixing the net result of their labors in lasting institutions, in increasing for posterity the great capital of traditional justice by reforms;and this will secure immortality to their genius and their will.
We are at the end of our inquiry. What is the result? It is the fact that the conception of justice grows out of necessary processes in our soul and necessarily influences economic life.
The idea of justice is, like other moral ideas, not imparted to men by some revelation, and just as little is it an arbitrary invention; it is the necessary product of our moral intuition and our logical thinking, and in so far it is an eternal truth, manifesting itself ever new yet ever similar metamorphoses. In many it works only as a vague feeling. In the course of history it develops, for the majority, into clear conceptions, standards and conclusions. According to the laws of his thought man must unify the manifold and then subject it to uniform standards. The supposition of moral communities in society creates the conception of an earthly justice; the supposition of the unity of all things, that of divine justice. It is the same chain of judgments and conclusions which, dissatisfied with the imperfections of earthly things, transfers the last compensation into a higher and better world. The idea of justice is thus connected with the highest and best that we think, imagine and believe.
But as this highest and last never reveals itself to mankind in its full splendor, as we eternally seek it, eternally battle for it, and though ever progressing, never reach it, so the idea of justice has no resting, determined existence on earth. As no penal law, no judge is absolutely just, so no established distribution of property and incomes is altogether just. But every consecutive epoch of mankind has won a higher measure of justice in this field. In custom, law and existing institutions which rule economic life we have the outcome of all the struggles for justice which history has seen for many thousand years.
The value of our own life, of our own time, does not lie so much in what was attained before us, as in the amount of strength and moral energy with which we press forward in the path of progress. Great civilized nations, great epochs and great men are not those who comfortably enjoy their ancestral inheritances, who eat, drink and increase production, but those who with greater energy than others devote their services to the great moral ideas of humanity; they are those who succeed in propagating moral ideas and in introducing them more deeply than hitherto into the sphere of egoistic struggles for existence; they are those who on the field of economics succeed in securing and carrying through juster institutions.
