The Struggle for Law
man is a born battler for the law in the interest of society.
I do not need to call attention to the extent to which the vocation of the individual to assert his legal right is ennobled when it is viewed in this way. Our actual theory tells us only of a purely passive attitude towards the law; the doctrine here advocated puts in its place one of reciprocity, in which the person with legal rights returns to the law the service which he receives from it. Our doctrine thus looks upon him as a collaborator in a great national work. Whether the person himself looks upon it in this way is a matter of no moment. For the grand and the sublime in the moral order of the world is that it can count on the services not only of those who comprehend it, but that it possesses efficacious means enough to make those who do not understand its commands labor for it without their knowledge or their will. To force men to engage in the matrimonial relation, it brings into play, in the case of some men, the noblest of all human
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