The Life of the Law a Struggle
ploughed away a few feet, or into whose meadow he has thrown a few stones. What signifies a square mile of barren land compared with a war which costs the lives of thousands, brings sorrow and misery into the palace and the hut, eats up millions and millions of the treasure of the state, and possibly imperils its existence? What folly to make such a sacrifice for such an end!
Such would have to be our judgment, if the peasant and the nation were measured with the same measure. Yet no one would wish to give to the nation the same advice as to the peasant. Every one feels that a nation which looked upon such a violation of law in silence would have signed its own death sentence. From the nation which allowed itself to be deprived of one square mile of territory by its neighbor, unpunished, the rest also would be taken, until nothing remained to it to call its own, and it had ceased to exist as a state; and such a nation would deserve no better fate.
But if a nation should have recourse to
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