370 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
heralded in terms of justice violated and justice demanded. All disintegration and reintegration of societies may be described in terms of less and greater approximation to justice. The patria potestas at the basis of Roman law was the expression of the Roman sense of just balance and proportion between the pater- familias and the members of his household. The gradual limita- tion in practice of the right thus recognized in theory, and then the elimination of certain elements of the patria potestas from other codes, illustrate the same prevalence of the sentiment of justice on the one hand, together with the companion fact of change in the idea of justice on the other hand. The mediaeval contract between lord and vassal, ratifying and including sub- contracts between vassal and minor vassal, and then the status outside of and beneath contract forced upon the non-feudal masses, were in the same sense theorems of justice. They repre- sented the estimate of proportion between interests and classes of persons that the mediaeval intellect had been able to form. The English system of primogeniture and entail, as contrasted with the French system of division of estates, is an exhibit again of justice in unlike forms, as it is conceived in two neighboring societies.
It goes without saying that all our contemporary social problems may be stated in terms of justice. Not only is this true as an academic proposition, but it is further true that all our social problems are arraignments both of our abstract ideas of justice and of the social order which is supposed to embody jus- tice. We have social problems because the conditions of order and progress are partially unsatisfied. This must be reiterated at every step, lest we seem, in dealing with one of the conditions of order, to forget that there are other equally essential condi- tions of order. Reserving for this qualification full force, we may maintain that every system of customs and laws by which the social order is controlled is a provisional theorem of justice. It formulates at least a sort of rule-of-thumb standard of justice. It is an hypothesis of justice. Experience tests the correctness of the hypothesis. If the assumption is measurably close to the reality, the customs and the laws remain elements of order. If
