The Struggle for Law
of legal right. The cultivation of the national feeling of legal right is care for the health and strength of the state. By this cultivation and care, I do not, of course, understand schooling and instruction, but the practical carrying out of all the principles of justice in all the relations of life. It is not, however, sufficient to occupy ourselves only with the external mechanism of the law; it may, indeed, be so organized and directed that the most perfect order may reign, and still that the demand above referred to may be entirely ignored. Personal bondage, the tax for protection paid by the Jew, and so many other principles and institutions of times past, which were in the most flagrant contradiction with a strong, healthy feeling of legal right, and which injured the state itself, perhaps, more than the citizens, peasants, Jews, on whom the burthen of them fell, in the first instance, were also conformable to law and order. The fixedness, clearness, certainty of positive law, the doing away with all those principles at which a healthy feeling of legal
106
