The Struggle for Law
struggle, to turn it to account, in union with those who think as he does, to raise the level of the honor of his class; and I mean here, not simply the subjective feeling of honor, but its objective recognition by the other classes of society and by legislation. The history of the social development of the last fifty years shows immense progress in this direction. What I have just said might have been applied half a century ago to most classes. The enhanced feeling of honor to be found in them is only the result and the expression of the legal position which they have secured.
What I have said above of honor is true also of property. The sensitiveness of the feeling of legal right in relation to property, the real sense of property—I mean here not the instinct of acquisition, the hunting after money and wealth, but the manly feeling of the owner, as the model representative of whom I have chosen the peasant, of the owner who defends what belongs to him, not because it is an object of value, but because it belongs to him—this feeling, this sense of
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