Importance to National Life
and esteems all else lightly when he is attacked in his personality. What matters it to him whence this attack upon his rights proceeds—whether from an individual, from his own government, or from a foreign nation? It is not the person of the aggressor that decides what resistance he shall oppose to the attack, but the energy of his feeling of legal right, the moral force with which he is wont to assert himself. Hence the principle is ever true: the political position of a people, both at home and abroad, is always in keeping with their moral force; the Celestial Empire with its bamboo, the rod for its adult children, and its hundreds of millions of inhabitants, will never attain, in the eyes of foreign nations, the respected position of little Switzerland. The natural disposition of the Swiss in the matter of art and poetry is anything but ideal. It is sober and practical, like that of the Romans. But, in the sense in which I have thus far used the expression “ideal,” in its relation to law, it is just as applicable to the Swiss as to the Englishman.
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