362                     ANCESTRY, LIFE, AND TIMES OF
rule of God and of reason, since the state is organized for the
sake of justice and a good life, and the good citizen is identical
with the good man;" that "virtue must be the serious care of
a state that truly deserves the name, political society being in
order to noble actions and an honorable self-sufficing life."i
The state, as a "public person," must have an immutable mo-
rality, not one thing here and another there, but the same
everywhere, that "lex nata non scripta" constitutional to man
and coeternal with the mind of God, whence it came, that
"jus," or sense of natural right, apart from which the state
has no foundation, save the passions, will, and inclinations of
men.    A pagan Cicero, by the light of nature alone, could
recognize this, in his speech for Milo, praising, before the
judges, that immutable law, "not one thing at Athens and
another at Eome, but the same everywhere," a law which he
declared to be the "fons wquitatis, fundamentum libertatis, vin-
culum societatis."    It is true that the legislature is the law-
making power, and that courts are but instruments to declare
and enforce it, and that the constitution of a state is the re-
sult of the will of the people.    But, in "a government of
the people, by the people, and for the people," it behooves the
people to respect the dicta and data of natural justice graved
in the moral constitution of man, and which are prior to the
constitution of the state; those necessary, primary, indemon-
strable, imperial, and authoritative, postulates of all society
not yet dehumanized, the bed-rock and bottom of all moral
distinctions and mutual confidence, apart from which no guar-
antees exist for justice, equity, truth, or faith, between man
and man.    Everything comes back, at last, to personal integ-
rity.    Our rights and obligations grow out of our relations,
nor is there a place where all the moralities and decencies
that belong to individual or associated life are displayed more
conspicuously than in those covenant or contract relations
which underlie the whole fabric of civilized society, and which,
if grounded injustice and truth, no legal technics or tricks of
practice, or judicial bias, may evade or destroy.    The state
must have a "conscience," and her morality must be something
other than the evolutionary "maxims of a generalized expe-
diency," as Herbert Spencer and his school would have it;
something better than the "customary commercial morality"
of the Bentham-Paley school, whose only pole-star was that
1 Politics of Aristotle (Jowett), Book, Vol. Ill, p. 9.