The Struggle for Law
sufficed for a long time to make the legal oppression of which he was the victim an impossibility.
In conjuring up this shadow, I have desired to show by a striking example how far the very man whose sentiment of legal right is strongest and most ideal may go astray when the imperfection of legal institutions refuses him satisfaction. Here the struggle for law becomes a struggle against the law. The feeling of legal right, left in the lurch by the power which should protect it, itself abandons the ground of the law and endeavors, by helping itself, to obtain what ignorance, bad will, or impotence refuses it. And it is not only a few very strong and violent characters, in which the national feeling of legal right raises its protest against such a condition of things, but this protest is sometimes repeated by the whole population under certain forms, which, according to their object or to the manner in which the whole people or a definite class look upon them or apply them, may be considered as popular substitutes for, and
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