The Struggle for Law
scenes of the one same drama, the struggle for rights, the struggle for the principles of law? If now, of all these forms, I choose the least violent, the legal struggle for individual rights in the form of an action at law, it is not because it has for jurists a higher interest than any other, but because, in a trial at law, the real nature of the case is most subject to the danger of being ignored both by jurists and the laity. In all other instances this real nature of the case appears in all its clearness. That in all other instances there is question of wealth or goods which warrant and repay great risk, even the dullest mind understands, and no one will, in such instances, raise the question: Why fight; why not rather yield? The magnificence of the sight of the highest display of human strength and sacrifice irresistibly carries all of us along with it and lifts us to the height of ideal judgment. But, in the struggle for individual private rights, just mentioned, the case is very different. The relative smallness of the interests with which it is concerned—uniformly the
22
