The Struggle for Law
true idea of property is lost. At the source of the stream it is not to be found. We may verify in the country, in a directly opposite sense, this fact of experience: that the manner in which the ruling classes look at property is not confined to the latter, but that it is communicated to the other classes of society. The person permanently living in the country, who does not keep entirely aloof from the peasantry, will involuntarily, and even when not urged thereto by his circumstances or his own peculiar character, take up something of the peasant’s frugality and sense of property. The same average man, under otherwise entirely similar circumstances, will be economical with the peasant in the country, and a spendthrift with the millionaire in a city like Vienna.
But whatever may be the cause of that weakness of character which the love of ease induces to evade the struggle for legal right, all we have to do here is to recognize it and to describe it as it is. What is the practical philosophy of life which it preaches but the
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