The Life of the Law a Struggle
question of mine and thine, the dull prosiness which uniformly attaches to this question—makes of this struggle, it would seem, simply a matter of cold calculation and sober contemplation; and the forms in which it moves (the mechanical routine of litigation, with the exclusion of all free, individual action and of the claimant himself) are ill calculated to weaken the unfavorable impression. However, even in the case of the action at law, there was a time when the parties to the action themselves were called on to enter the lists, and when the true meaning of the struggle was thus made to appear. While the sword still decided the controversy concerning mine and thine, when the medieval knight sent the challenge to his opponent, even the non-participant may have been forced to surmise that, in the struggle, there was question not only of the value of the thing, of averting a pecuniary loss, but that the person, in the thing, defended himself, his rights and his honor.
But we shall not need to conjure up a condition of things long past and vanished to
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