Assertion of Rights a Social Duty
incorporated, of a photographic picture, as I have called it, in which a transient ray of the law has perpetuated itself, and which may be broken up and divided without affecting the law; but there is a question of the law itself which has been despised, trampled under foot, and which must be defended, if the law itself is not to become a mockery and a word without meaning. When the legal right of the individual is sacrificed, the law is sacrificed likewise.
This view, which I may call the solidarity of the law with concrete legal right, is, as I have shown above, the real expression of their relations in their most intimate nature. It is not, however, so very obscure but that the mere egotist, incapable of entertaining an elevated idea, may catch it. On the contrary, it may be the one which he understands the most readily, for his interest is to associate himself with the state in the struggle. And thus even he is, without his knowledge or his will, lifted above himself and his legal right to that ideal social eminence where he
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