Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
pensableness of this very branch of the law to the vital end of the particular class. The degree of energy with which the feeling of legal right reacts against an infringement of legal right is, in my eyes, a sure measure of the importance which individuals, a class or people, really attach, both to the law in general and to a special branch of it, for themselves and their special aim in life. This principle I hold to be universally true, true in the case of public as well as of private law. The same irritability which the different classes manifest in respect to a violation of all those legal provisions which, in a special manner, constitute the basis of their existence, we find also in the case of states, in respect to those institutions in which the peculiar principle of their life seems realized. The measure of their irritability, and of the value which they attach to these heads of the law, is found in the criminal law. The surprising difference which prevails in criminal law (Strafrecht—penal justice), in respect to severity and mildness, is accounted
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