Importance to National Life
in the principle: For the state which desires to be respected abroad, and to be firm and unshaken internally, there is no more precious good which it has to guard and foster than the national feeling of legal right. The fostering of it is one of the highest and most important duties of political pedagogy. In the healthy, vigorous feeling of legal right of the individual, the state possesses the most fruitful source of its own strength, the surest guaranty, from within and from without, of its own existence. The feeling of legal right is the root of the whole tree. If the root be good for nothing, if it withers in the rocks and in the sand, all the rest is but an illusion; the storm comes and plucks it up by the roots. But the trunk and the top have the advantage that they are seen, while the roots are hidden in the ground and veiled from sight. The disastrous influence which unjust laws and bad legal institutions exercise on the moral power of the nation acts under ground, in those regions which so many amateur statesmen do not consider worthy of their atten-
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