Struggle for Rights a Personal Duty
be deplorable if it were otherwise. Were it otherwise, individuals and nations would lose the feeling of legal right in proportion as they advanced in culture. A glance at history and at everyday life is sufficient to show that this is not the case. Nor is the answer to be found in the contrast of rich and poor. Different as is the measure with which the rich man and the poor man measure the value of things, it is not at all applied in the case of a violation of legal right; for here the question is not the material value of a thing, but the ideal value of a legal right, the energy of the feeling of legal right in relation to property; and hence it is not the amount of property, but the strength of the feeling of legal right, which here decides the issue. The best proof of this is afforded by the English people. Their wealth has caused no detriment to their feeling of legal right; and what energy it still possesses, even in pure questions of property, we, on the Continent, have frequently proof enough of, in the typical figure of the traveling English-
65
