Assertion of Rights a Social Duty
sentinel of the law is changed into its murderer; the physician poisons his patient; the guardian strangles his ward. In ancient Rome, the corrupt judge was punished with death. For the justice which has violated the law there is no accuser as terrible as the sombre, reproachful form of the criminal made a criminal by his wounded feeling of legal right—it is its own bloody shadow. The victim of corrupt and partial justice is driven almost violently out of the way of the law; he becomes the avenger of his own wrong, the executor of his own rights, and it not infrequently happens that, overshooting the mark, he becomes the sworn enemy of society, a robber and a murderer. If, like Michel Kohlhaas, his nature be noble and moral, it may guard him against going so far astray, but he will become a criminal, and by suffering the penalty of his crime, a martyr to his feeling of legal right. It is said that the blood of martyrs does not flow in vain, and the saying may have been true of him. It may be that his warning shadow
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