Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
right, both of states and individuals, is most violent when they feel themselves threatened in the conditions of existence peculiar to them.[1]
Just as the peculiar conditions of a class or calling invest certain heads of the law with an enhanced importance, and thus enhance the sensitiveness of the feelings of legal right in respect to a violation of them, these same conditions may also produce a weakening of that sentiment. The servant-class cannot maintain and develop the feeling of honor among themselves as do the other strata of society. Their position brings with it certain humiliations, against which a single servant revolts in vain, so long as the class itself endures them. An individual with a sensitive feeling of honor, in such a situation, has no alternative but to lower his claims to the level of those of his like or to give up the calling. Only when such a way of feeling becomes general is there any prospect for the individual, instead of wasting his strength in a useless
- ↑ The learned know that I have here only turned to account ideas, the merit of having recognized and formulated which belongs to the great Montesquieu, “Esprit des Lois”.
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