The Struggle for Law
point of abstract law, placed slaves on a level with beasts. The assertion of one’s legal rights is, therefore, a duty of moral self-preservation—the total surrender of those rights, now impossible, but once possible, is moral suicide. But the law is only the aggregate of its separate parts, each of which embodies a peculiar moral condition of existence: property as well as marriage, contracts as well as reputation. A renunciation of one of them is, therefore, legally just as impossible as the renunciation of the entire law. But it certainly is possible that a person should attack one of these conditions; and it is the duty of the person attacked to repel the attack: for it is not sufficient to place these conditions of existence under the protection of law, represented by mere abstract principles; they must be asserted in the concrete by the individual; and the incentive to this assertion of them is furnished when one arbitrarily dares to attack them.
But not all legal wrong is arbitrariness, that is a revolt against the idea of law. The
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