Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
minds, this tenacious distrust, is a thing not purely individual, determined by the accidental character of the person, but that it is decided by the general differences of education and calling. This distrust is most insurmountable in the case of the peasant. The litigiousness of which he is accused is nothing but the product of two factors especially peculiar to him—a strong sense of property, not to say avarice, and mistrust. No one so well understands his interests, and holds as firmly to what he has, as the peasant; and yet no one so readily sacrifices his fortune to a suit at law. This is apparently a contradiction; but, in reality, it is entirely explainable. Precisely his largely developed sense of property makes an injury to his property all the more sensitively felt, and the reaction, therefore, all the more violent. The litigiousness of the peasant is nothing but the aberration of the sense of property, produced by mistrust, an aberration which, like the analogous phenomenon in love, jealousy, aims its dart at itself, inasmuch as it destroys what it seeks to save.
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