The Struggle for Law
in my person with all the means at my command. By tolerating that disregard of law, I consent to support injustice for a single moment in my life. But to do this, no one should lend a hand.
Towards the bonâ fide possessor of my chattel, I stand in a very different situation. Here the question is what I have to do. It is not a question of my feeling of legal right, of my character, of my personality, but a pure question of interest; for I have nothing here at stake but the value of my chattel, and here, therefore, I am entirely warranted in weighing the gain and stake, and the possibility of a doubtful issue, one against the other, and to come to a decision accordingly: to sue, abstain from suing, or arbitrate.[1] Arbitration or settlement is the point of meeting of such a calculation of probabilities, made
- ↑ The above passage should have guarded me from the supposition that I preached the battle for one’s legal rights without inquiring further concerning motives and circumstances, and that I considered the surrender of a questionable right as entirely unjustifiable. Only where the person is trampled under foot in his rights have I declared the vindication of one’s rights to be a vindication of one’s self, and thus a matter of honor and a social duty. When this difference, on which I have laid so much stress, is overlooked, and the absurd view attributed to me, that wrangling and contention have something of the beautiful in them, and that litigiousness is a virtue, I can find no explanation of the fact, except by assuming an evil intention to set up a view which is not liked in order to refute it, or a negligence in reading which forgets at the end of the book what was read in the beginning.
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