The Struggle for Law
fraudulent bankruptcy, to him and others like him.
By what I have just said I have not intended simply to show that the irritability of the feeling of legal right varies according to class and calling, inasmuch as that feeling measures the wounding character of the injury in accordance with the interest which the class, as a class, has not to endure it. The proof of this fact serves only to place in its true light the truth of a much higher order, that every man possessed of a legal right defends the moral conditions of his existence when he defends his legal right. For the fact that the feeling of legal right shows itself most irritable, in the case of the three classes named, in the points in which we have recognized the conditions of existence of these classes peculiarly to reside, proves that the reaction of the feeling of legal right is not like that of feelings generally, determined only by the temperament and character of the individual, but that it is determined likewise by a social cause; viz., the feeling of the indis-
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