The Struggle for Law
tion; they are concerned only with the stately top; of the poison which rises to the top from the root they have no idea whatever. But despotism knows where it must strike to fell the tree; it leaves the top untouched at first, but destroys the roots. Every despotism has begun with attacks on private law, with the violation of the legal rights of the individual; when its work is done the tree falls of itself. Hence the necessity, above all, of opposing it here, and the Romans well knew what they were doing when they took advantage of an attempt on female chastity and honor to put an end to the kings and the decemvirate. To destroy the feeling of personal liberty in the peasant by means of taxes and services, to put the citizen under the guardianship of the police, to make the permission to go on a journey dependent on the granting of a passport, and the thought of the author on the approval of the censor, to impose taxes according to one’s good will and pleasure—even a Machiavelli could have given no better recipe to extinguish
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