Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
given above of the square mile, to show what that view of life which would measure the resistance to wrong according to the material value of the object in controversy, means to the life of nations. But a principle which, wherever tested, proves itself completely unthinkable, the dissolution and destruction of the law, cannot, even where, by way of exception, its fatal consequences are paralyzed by other circumstances, be called correct. I shall have occasion to show later what a disastrous influence such a principle exerts, even under such relatively favorable circumstances.
Let us, therefore, reject this morality of convenience and ease, which no nation and no individual, with a healthy feeling of legal right, has ever adopted. It is the sign and the product of a diseased feeling of legal right; it is coarse and naked materialism, in the domain of law. Even materialism has, within certain limits, its raison d’être in this domain. To profit by one’s legal rights, to make use of them and to assert them when
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