The Struggle for Law
enon of the storm in the moral world: sublime, majestic in the rapidity, suddenness, and power with which it breaks forth, in the strength of that moral force, which like a tempest or the elements in a fury, sweeps everything before it, then grows calm and beneficent, and produces a purification of the moral atmosphere enjoyed both by the individual and by all. But if the limited power of the individual spends itself in vain against institutions which afford a protection to lawlessness which they refuse to right, it is plain that the storm recoils on the head of its author; and then one of two things: either his wounded feeling of legal right will make of him one of those criminals of whom I shall speak further on, or he will afford us the no less tragical spectacle of a man who, ever bearing in his breast the sting which injustice that he has not been able to resist, has left there, gradually loses his moral life and all faith in the law.
I readily grant that this ideal sentiment of legal right, possessed by the person by whom
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