Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
property, also may become enfeebled under the unhealthy influence of causes and circumstances. What, we hear a great many ask, has the thing which belongs to me, to do with my person, with me? It serves me as a means of subsistence, of acquisition, of enjoyment; but as there is no moral duty incumbent on me to amass a great deal of money, there can be no duty incumbent on me to go to law for a mere trifle, at a great expenditure of time and money, and at the sacrifice of my rest. The only motive which urges me to go to law to assert my right to my property is the motive which determines me to acquire it, and which determines the disposition I shall make of it—my interest. Whether I shall go to law to assert my right to my property, or not, is simply a question of interest.
For my part, in such a view, I can see only a degeneration of the true sense of property, the reason of which seems to me to be a displacement, an ignoring, of its natural basis. I do not hold wealth and luxury responsible for this degeneration—in neither of them do
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