Page:Struggle for Law (1915).djvu/151

 CHAPTER V IMPORTANCE OF THE STRUGGLE FOR LAW TO NATIONAL LIFE

HAVE now reached the end of my reflections on the struggle of the individual for his legal rights. We have followed him through all his motives, from the lowest of mere calculation up to the ideal one of the assertion of his personality and its moral conditions of existence, until we reached the realization of the idea of justice—that highest point, from which one false step plunges the man whose feeling of violated right has made a criminal into the abyss of lawlessness.

But the interest of this struggle is not confined, by any means, to private life or private law. Rather does it extend far beyond them. A nation is, after all, only the sum of all the individuals who compose it, and the nation