Assertion of Rights a Social Duty
great injustice, if we were to deny that we also possessed this ideal feeling. Every man who sees the law violated and feels indignation at the sight, possesses it. While, in fact, an egotistical motive is mixed up with the painful feeling caused by a personal wrong, this indignation is produced exclusively by the power of morality over the human heart. It is the energy of our moral nature protesting against the violation of the law; it is the most beautiful and the highest testimony which the feeling of legal right can bear to itself; it is a moral phenomenon which calls for the study of the psychologist and appeals to the imagination of the poet. No other feeling, so far as I know, is able so suddenly, so radically, to make a change in man; for it is a demonstrated fact that it has the power to rouse the gentlest and most conciliating natures to a pitch of passion which is otherwise entirely foreign to them; a fact which proves that they have been wounded in the noblest part of their being and touched in its most sensitive fibres. It is the phenom-
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