justice. Society may subsist, tho' not in the most comfortable state, without benefi|cence; but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it.
Tho' nature, therefore, exhorts mankind to acts of beneficence, by the pleasing con|sciousness of deserved reward, she has not thought it necessary to guard and enforce the practice of it by the terrors of merited punishment in case it should be neglected. It is the ornament which embellishes, not the foundation which supports the build|ing, and which it was, therefore, sufficient to recommend, but by no means necessary to impose. Justice, on the contrary, is the main pillar that upholds the whole edi|fice. If it is removed, the great, the im|mense fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and to support seems in this world, if I may say so, to have been the peculiar and darling care of nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms. To en|force the observation of justice, therefore, nature has implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those ter|rors of merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great safe-guards of the association of mankind, to protect
