Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
policy of the coward? The coward who flees the battle saves what others sacrifice—his life; but he saves it at the cost of his honor. Only the fact that others make a stand protects him and the community from the consequences which his mode of action would otherwise inevitably draw after it. If all thought as he, they would all be lost. And precisely the same is true of the cowardly abandonment of one’s legal rights. Innocent as the act of an individual, it would, if raised to the dignity of a general principle of action, be the destruction of the entire law. And even under these circumstances, the apparent absence of danger in such a mode of action is possible only because the struggle of law against wrong is, on the whole, not affected by it any further. For, indeed, it is not individuals alone who are called upon to take part in this struggle, but, in organized states, the state-power also takes a very large part in it, inasmuch as it prosecutes and punishes all serious attacks on the life, liberty or property of the individual, of its own motion,
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