Page:Struggle for Law (1915).djvu/182

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The Struggle for Law


the heir who does the same thing in good faith; between the agent who has deceived me and the one who has simply made a mistake, our present law knows no difference. Everywhere the trial turns only on the bare money interest. Our lawyers to-day are so far from believing that the balance of Justice should, in private law as well as in criminal law, weigh the injustice which has been done, and not only the pecuniary interest, that, in daring to speak about it, I must expect to hear it objected that in this precisely lies the difference between criminal law and the law pertaining to the rights of persons. Yes, this is true of our actual law, unfortunately true, but it is not true of law in itself. It would be first necessary to prove to me that there is one part of the law in which the idea of justice should not be realized to its full extent. But the idea of justice is inseparable from the carrying out of the idea of culpability.

The second instance of aberration of our modern jurisprudence, referred to above, con-

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