The Struggle for Law
is the real school of the political education of the people, and if we would know how a people, in case of need, will defend their political rights and their place among the nations, let us examine how the separate members of the nation assert their own right in private life. I have already cited the example of the combative Englishman; and I can only repeat here what I said above: In the shilling for which he stubbornly struggles the political development of England lives. No one will dare to wrest from a people who, in the very smallest matters, bravely assert their rights, the highest of their possessions, and it is, therefore, not mere chance that the same people of antiquity who attained to the greatest political development within, and displayed the greatest power externally, the Romans, had at the same time the most fully developed system of private law. Law is idealism—paradoxical as this may seem—not the idealism of the fancy, but of character: that is, of the man who looks upon himself as his own end,
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