Page:Struggle for Law (1915).djvu/156

 This idealism of the healthy feeling of legal right would undermine its own foundation if it confined itself to the defense of its own rights only, without taking any part in the maintenance of law and order. It knows not only that in defending its own legal rights it defends the law, but that in defending the law it defends its own legal rights. In a community in which this feeling, this sense for strict law prevails, we look about in vain for the saddening sights so common elsewhere—the mass of the people, when the authorities prosecute the criminal or the violator of the laws or seek to arrest him, taking his part, and seeing in the state power the natural enemy of the people. Every one knows that the cause of the law is his own cause. Only the criminal here sympathizes with the criminal. The honest man does not. Rather does he lend a willing and helping hand to the police and to the authorities.

It will be scarcely necessary for me to express in words the inference to be drawn from what has been said. It is summed up